#zhnetsy

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@zhnetsi

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Moodboards

Marena Volosovna Kulchytskaya, “The Black Hag”, “The Abbess”

There is no God but Death. The Zhnetsy are her messengers.

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Moodboards

Nane Barsaminovna Aslanyan; sycophant, matriarch, black widow, sadist, scapegoat

There is no God but Death. The Zhnetsy are her messengers.

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || GIF sets: Melanippa Ippolitovna Chernyshova

“Upon meeting Melanippa Ippolitovna Chernyshova for the first time, I thought she was a rather effeminate man. When we were introduced, she smiled at me overly friendly sort of way and then hung on my every word all night. I was embarrassed to find out that she was actually a woman, but she only laughed and insisted that she took no offense. Still, she then quickly developed the habit of regularly showing up at our apartment during the day. I couldn’t imagine what on earth she wanted, but when I complained to Yermolay about it, he immediately seemed to know, but declined to tell me the truth.

It was Efah Saulovna who let me what was going on, or rather, she gave me a warning. She informed me that Chernyshova was a lesbian and, more pressingly, she already had a lover who lived in Lysaya Gora; another Zhnets by the name of Alena Torkanovna Cheremisina. This Cheremisina was exceedingly jealous and Efah Saulovna informed me blankly that she found out that her precious “Melanyushka” had taken a liking to me, things would not end well for me. In 1924, you see, Cheremisina had discovered that Chernyshova was sleeping with some Chechen and flew into a jealous rage, bombarding her lover with howlers and was only appeased after Chernyshova had the Chechen arrested and exiled to Central Asia on fabricated charges.

I later met with this Alena Torkanovna around 1926. I’d imagined some sort of glamorous beauty, but instead, she was pudgy and bespectacled with large front teeth. She was, however, obviously utterly enamored with Chernyshova who clearly relished Cheremisina’s worshipful devotion. That, however, that didn’t mean that Chernyshova made any move to assist Cheremisina in the slightest in 1937 when she was arrested on trumped up charges of treason and trying to poison Valery Vsevolodovich. ...

Chernyshova’s elder sister, Antiopa Ippolitovna, resembled her, being tall and black-haired with heavily-lidded eyes, though less emaciated. She went gray early, wore thin-rimmed glasses, and had the look of an old spinster librarian. They were both the two youngest daughters of an Orthodox priest from Mordovia and had four living older sisters (two had died already), but were estranged from them. They both enjoyed discussing how they’d been disowned by their conservative family, Antiopa for eloping with a Jew (who just so happened to Efah Saulovna’s older brother, Gavril) and Melanippa for her political beliefs.

Gavril Saulovich and Antiopa had two or three daughters, one of whom ended up marrying Alsu Andreyevna‘s son, which just goes to show you what an tight-knit group they were, and they remained so until they were all liquidated in 1940. I am not certain whatever became of Sofoniya Gavrilovna and Azgar Borisovich’s baby.” 

— An excerpt from the memoirs of Pelagiya Yuriyevna Vartanian, second wife of Ksantip Kiprianovich Zelinsky

Extracts from Chernyshova’s original written confession:

“… I helped destroy my former comrades, Vishnevskaya, Kardos, Klyukvin, Zhovnirenko, Sadovskaya, Ozolina, Malinina, Geyer, Plaksenko, Kalnietyte, Liepa, Krukovskaya, Khristoforova, Saranchina, Baltais, Arkhipienka, Saranchin... I also destroyed Cheremisina, a woman I lived with for years and whose bed I shared. I used to call her my chubby little bunny, you know…. I’m sure Valery Vsevolodovich and Alsu Andreyevna will try to use that as a trump card against me, but I’m not about to deny it. Yes, I loved Lena once and yes, I betrayed and destroyed her all the same.

So too did I destroy Aurors, writers, Vedmas and Vedmaks, current and former members of the SK, Babushkin’s comrades in arms; yes, even ordinary witches and wizards. I can still hear them screaming and weeping even now, begging me to believe that they weren’t spies or traitors. Little did they know that I often did believe them; I just didn’t much care. There was precious little evidence in most cases, but denunciations and confessions that we extracted from torturing them half to death and threatening their families. Some went to their deaths thinking that they were dying for some higher purpose. At one time, I too believed that the killings were necessary to safeguard our land and our people. Yet, I can only conclude now that they all died for absolutely nothing.

Kulchytskaya used to tell us that, as Zhnetsy, we were like family and while we existed primarily to protect the party, our people, and our motherland, we also had a duty to protect each other. And I have failed in my duty, completely. I cannot see how anything I’ve done in the past four years has helped protect anything. This was not killing and terror for the sake of a brighter future and it has almost certainly destroyed our future, not saved it.

The reality is that if war is coming, then our party and our land and our people are unquestionably doomed. Should Grindelwald and his army invade, our motherland will be conquered and all people, both magic and zemlyanin, killed or enslaved. There is no section of society we haven’t decimated, uprooted, and decapitated, so what hope do we have to even fight them now, let alone defeat them? All I can see for our future is darkness and destruction on an even greater scale.

I did not betray my people or my motherland in the way you say, with treason, coups, or espionage, but I could not have done more harm to them if I had. I will not plead for my life, for I have no desire to keep living any longer. I can barely sleep and when I do, the nightmares are too much to bear. Nothing brings me joy anymore and I cannot imagine that it ever will. I want to be killed as soon as possible, because I cannot live with myself knowing that I helped destroy everything that I swore I would protect.

Chernyshova, Melanippa Ippolitovna; 4 February 1940 ”

[ gifs originally by @lyrabelacquad ]

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Moodboards

Lyudmila Vyacheslavna Vishnevskaya

There is no God but Death. The Zhnetsy are her messengers.

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || GIF Sets: Founders of the Zhnetsy

Ausrine Avreliyevna Kalnietyte (7 December 1882 – 30 April 1938) See here

Devana Ipabogovna Zalischenko (19 February 1873 – 25 November 1933) See here

Vanda Kazimirovna Krukovskaya (23 June 1873 – 30 April 1938) See here

Sofoniya Ilyinichna Zalmanovich (28 March 1876 – 14 November 1941) See here

Miroslav Ruslanovich Plaksenko (16 July 1873 – 14 December 1937) See here

Mirina Iosifovna Voinova (5 April 1878 – 14 February 1926) See here

Layma Perkunasovna Liepa (12 September 1871 – 30 April 1938) See here

Yeva Naumovna Yablochkova (25 June 1877 – 4 March 1940) See here

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Events: The capture, interrogation, and death of Olimpiya Feodorovna Zmeyeva

“…. Because of her fearsome reputation, Zmeyeva was perceived as a grave threat to state security. In actuality, this fear was misplaced. She had never been fully trusted by any of the leaders of the either the KDMM or the VSDP, who were often irritated or offended by her theatrics and attention-seeking, and neither the British, French, or Polish ministries were willing to even humor her schemes any more. Like her long-time friend and ally, Sinon Venizelos, she was perceived as something of a self-serving opportunist and confidence trickster. That Zmeyeva fell far for the scheme to lure her back to the USSR is far from surprising as, by this point, she had few options left open to her and she was, moreover, in increasingly failing health, her body ravaged by years of alcohol and opium abuse and did not expect to live for much longer.

It is not surprising, either, that she broke quickly under the Zhnetsy’s care and agreed to try and lure in Ugarova, Korsakova, Hahn, Venizelos, and Volkov, as she likely figured that none would respond to any pleas for rescue from her, anyhow.  That Venizelos did respond to her plea cannot but have been a shock, as the two of them had had a something of a falling out due to his third wife’s dislike and mistrust of her. Notes in the archives indicate Kulchytskaya and Zalischenko would have preferred to keep Zmeyeva and Venizelos alive longer, but they were overruled by Afanasiy Kostov, who was suspicious of the entire enterprise.”

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Zhnetsy; Participants in and Victims of the Great Harvest

Snezhana Kurbatovna Barsova (14 January 1875 – 30 August 1938) Barsova was born in what's now the Sverdlovsk Oblast to a Pureblood family of mixed Ukrainian and Russian origins. She completed her studies at Koldovostortez in 1894 and joined the OVV in 1895. She was arrested in 1898, 1904, and 1905 and repeatedly imprisoned and exiled. From 1910 to 1916, she lived in the city of Yekaterinburg where she worked as a teacher to educate young witches and wizards who had been denied entrance to Koldovstortez.

She first joined the Zhnetsy in 1918 and between 1919 and 1920, helped Germes Afinodorovich Golubtsov wrest Siberia away from the nominal head of the VSDP, Aleksey Konstantinovich Orlov, who was finally murdered by irate Goblins while attempting to flee. After the Civil War, she became the head of the interior department of the Zhnetsy to monitor internal dissidents. In 1929, she became head of the Far Eastern department Zhnetsy and worked alongside the Auror, Varvara Grigoryevna Sarychina, who had been sent to the Far East around the same time.

However, in June 1937, she received word to return to Lysaya Gora and was promptly arrested after arrival and accused of Lutsenkoism, espionage, and organizing conspiracies in the Zhnetsy. She was executed 30 August 1938. The verdict against her was overturned in 1957 due to lobbying by her sons, Yermak and Kurbat, and two of her nieces, Khioniya and Marena Afonasiyevna Barsova, whom she had adopted after their father’s death in 1908. 

Filipp Andreyevich Sarkanais (15 August 1880 – 21 September 1938) Sarkanais was a Latvian rozhdennyy zemley whose parents were schoolteachers. He first joined a revolutionary group in 1897, shortly after completing his studies at Koldovstortez, and was in exile in Austria and Germany from 1900.

He was arrested in Austria in 1914 and deported to Sweden only returning to the Russian Empire in 1918. He was one of the earliest members of the Zhnetsy and quickly gained a reputation for extreme sadism. Despite this, he was apparently a friend of Ausrine Avreliyevna Kalnietyte, though when and how they met they is unknown.

However, in January 1923, Mirina Feodorovna Voinova had him was dismissed from the Zhnetsy after he got into a bar fight in Moscow. Two months later, he was expelled from the BK as well for continuing to be a violent drunk. According to the memoirs of Khosrov Tsolagovich Sahakyan, Sarkanais blamed Voinova personally for his misfortune, became obsessed with plotting some of vague horrible vengeance against her, and proudly boasted after her death from Black Cat Flu in 1926 that he had cursed her. This may have been the origin of the idea that she was poisoned, though during the Great Harvest, this was instead oddly attributed to Lyudmila Vyacheslavna Vishnevskaya and Voinova’s older brother, Nestor Feodorovich Voinov, neither of whom had any particular reason to want her dead.

Regardless, Sarkanais was permitted to rejoin both the BK and Zhnetsy in 1928 and found work as a guard in Vyraj from 1931. He was arrested on 3 July 1938 and executed on 21 September 1938.

Lyudmila Bogdanovna Malinina (22 January 1884 – 20 August 1952) The elder sister of Milica Bogdanovna Malinina, both of them were daughters of ethnic Russian Aurors from the Ukraine. Lyudmila first joined the BK in 1903, having been recruited by her husband, Yaromir Dmitryevich Arbuzov, and became a healer. After 1917, she and her sister both worked in the Aurors’ office as assistants of Roksana Anatolyevna Cyhanenko. In 1920, they were both transferred into the Zhnetsy. Marena Kulchytskaya came to regard the elder Malinina as well-suited to root out corruption in the organization, which was a responsibility that she took very seriously.

Malinina resigned from the in December 1936 on account of her ill-health, only seven months before her younger sister was arrested. Shortly after, her brother-in-law asked her to look after his sons, whom he could not bear to look at anymore, as they kept asking him what happened to their mother. He later left for Siberia in May 1937 and never returned, as he was arrested that July. Malinina, her daughter, and nephews were both left alone until July 1938 when they were all likewise arrested. She was charged with having participated in the coup plot that her sister had supposedly orchestrated with Vishnevskaya, Saranchin, Arkhipienka, and Alena Torkanovna Cheremisina, among others, and sentenced to spend fifteen years in prison, while her daughter and nephews were deported to Uzbekistan.

She died in 1952, while still in prison. Her daughter, Radmila Yaromirovna Arbuzova, was allowed to return from exile in Uzbekistan in 1957, but both of the Saranchin boys had disappeared after being re-arrested in 1947. Arbuzova devoted the rest of her life to trying to find her cousins, but to no avail. In her memoir, Valentina Romanovna Vyalitsyna, the stepdaughter of Nane Aslanyan, opined that the two of them were almost certainly dead and had perhaps met their ends in 1949 as part of an operation that Svarog Borisovich Myasnikov had undertaken that had also disposed of a grandson of Oksana Lutsenko, Taras, and two sons of the executed Auror, Merkuriy Ilyich Znamenshchikov.

Syvne Morozkovna Snegova (1 February 1886 – 1 December 1938) Snegova’s father, Morozko Nikolayevich Snegov, was a supporter of the KDMM who was been exiled to Siberia in 1881 while her mother was Nenets. Without formal education, she moved to Novosibirsk (then known as Novonikolayevsk) in 1904 in search of work. She was still present there during the Revolution and was arrested by the White Army after they took the city in 1918, who thought she was probably a spy.

After the Red Army retook the city, she was freed and joined the BK in 1919. From 1926 until 1934, while working in Kazakhstan, she first met and befriended Valery Medvednikov and, later, Melanippa Chernyshova. When Medvednikov was appointed head of the Zhnetsy in the fall of 1936, he had Snegova transferred to the Lysaya Gora office. She was one of the few of his appointees who had not served under Alsu Zherebtsova.

After the arrest of Viktor Arkhipovich Baltais in July 1938, she was appointed head of the Ledenets Zhnetsy, but the arrests and executions did not lessen. In the fall of 1938, she was supposed to replace Chernyshova as Medvednikov’s deputy, but Kostov intervened and appointed Nane Aslanyan instead after a low-ranking Zhnets from the North Caucasus named Ivanna Pavlovna Horobchenko denounced Snegova as one of the Zhnetsy who had covered for traitors and spies, such as Yelisaveta Ivanovna Lisitsyna, among others. 

Having apparently seen the writing in the wall, she filled her coat pockets with rocks and walked into the Black Sea in the early morning hours of 1 December 1938. Her body was discovered three weeks later, but her death was hushed up.

Gavril Saulovich Leichenberg (26 March 1889 – 25 February 1940) Leichenberg was born in the Ukraine into a poor family. His father was a Jewish zemylanin and a carpenter by trade while his mother was a witch. He had no formal education, but moved to Kurinyyenozhki in 1905 and found work in a shop there. In 1906, he there met the Koldovstortez student, Antiopa Ippolitovna Chernyshova, and they eloped together in 1907, much to the anger of her strict parents, a Russian Orthodox priest and a witch from an landowning Old Pureblood family. They had three daughters together, but did not officially marry until 1919.

He joined the BK in 1918 and then the Zhnetsy in 1921, probably after being recruited by his sister-in-law, Melanippa Chernyshova. He was initially stationed in the Crimea during the Civil War, but was transferred to the North Caucasus in 1924, where his sister-in-law and younger sister already were. He remained there until January 1937 when he was appointed head of the Zhnetsy of Nizhny Novgorod and the surrounding areas. Following the suicide of Kharon Perevoznikov that July, though, he instead became the head of Afanasiy Kostov’s personal bodyguards.

Leichenberg overlooked the arrest and death of his younger sister in the summer and fall of 1938, but was himself arrested 5 December 1938, one day before Alsu Zherebtsova. After being extensively tortured, he claimed that Medvednikov, Chernyshova, and Zherebtsova had ordered him to assassinate Kostov and the other members of the Sovet Koldunov and make them look like accidents.

He was executed on 25 February 1940. His wife, two of his three daughters, and his two sons-in-law were both executed the following day. The middle daughter, Sofoniya, (who was married to one of the sons of Alsu Zherebtsova) was briefly spared, because she was pregnant. She was executed a week after giving birth that April and her infant daughter was sent to an orphanage.

Gekata Iosifovna Saranchina (2 November 1890 – 31 August 1938) Saranchina was born in the Ukraine, a daughter of a zemlyanin Jewish merchant and a witch. A healer and an herbologist by trade, she was involved in revolutionary activities from 1904, as were her older brothers, Minos and Germes.

She first joined the Zhnetsy in 1919 and was initially based in the Ukraine and later Belarus before transferred to Lysaya Gora in the fall of 1936, shortly after her sister-in-law, Milica Malinina, was made head of the Belarusian Zhnetsy in her place. She and her former deputy in Belarus, Yevrinom Vlasiyevich Mushenko, had Malinina arrested in the spring of 1937, though sources vary about whether they directed her torture. Zlata Bogdanovna Sorokina, who was a long-time friend of Germes Saranchin, described Saranchina as taciturn and cold by nature and noted that she and her sister-in-law, Malinina shared a deep mutual antipathy.

Saranchin afterward took an active part in the all of repressions throughout 1937, including the failed attempt to force Isidora Kiprianovna Zelinskaya to incriminate Anfisa Zoranovna Krupina and Nestor Voinov. More successfully, she helped organize the second and third show trials with the help of her oldest brother, Minos, who was a specialist in magical law and protege of the notorious Andrestiya Minosovna Dombrovskaya. In the summer of 1937, she and Mushenko were given the responsibility of primarily torturing confessions out of prominent arrested Aurors, including Znamenshchikov, Mirina Timofeyevna Babochkina, Kaloyan Ivanovich Reznikov, and Mikhail Anatolyevich Reznichenko.

She was herself arrested 5 May 1938 and accused of having participated in the vast conspiracy in the Zhnetsy. Her oldest brother, Minos, had been arrested for about a week earlier for openly admitting that the third trial had been a frame-up and the defendants had been coached in what to say. They were both executed in August 1938. Though Germes had been arrested in July 1937, Medvednikov and Chernyshova apparently forgot that he was still alive and so he would unknowingly outlive both his siblings by a little less than a month. In 1956, Minos’ conviction would be posthumously overturned, but this honor was not granted to either Germes or Gekata on the grounds that they’d helped knowingly frame innocent people.

Orfna Orfeyevna Olenenko (30 April 1891 – 6 February 1941) Olenenko was born in the northern Ukraine to a Halfblood family of mixed Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish origins. Despite claims to the contrary, she was of no relation to Avrelia Artyomovna Olenenko. Regardless, she completed her studies at Koldovstortez in 1908 and afterwards found a career as a scholar of arcane languages.

She joined the BK in 1917 and became a member of the Zhnetsy in 1921 and was stationed in Belarus, the Ukraine, and Mongolia before being transferred to the Lysaya Gora center in the department of foreign intelligence. She became the deputy head of the department in 1936 and masterminded a series of foreign assassinations before and after the death of her nominal superior, Sigizmund Karolovich Markevich. The victims of these operations included the leaders of the OSK, Kserksy Kirovych Sokolenko and Danica Svjatoslavina Tkachenko; Viktor Vladimirovich Lustenko and his second wife; one of the daughters of the late terrorist Olimpiya Feodorovna Zmeyeva; the Swiss Lutsenkoists, Isengrim and Hirsent Louvel; the former VSDP aurors, Anatoly von Hahn and Ilnаra Zufarovna Ashinova; and the defector Zhnetsy, Khosrov Sahakyan and Olga Rogvolodovna Stieglitz.

Despite (or because of all such actions), Nane Aslanyan had Olenenko arrested in November 1938 on charges of having been privy to the vast conspiracy in the Zhnetsy. She was executed 6 February 1941, though her husband and three children were left alone. She was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Miloslav Vyacheslavich Klyukvin (13 June 1892 – 20 September 1937) Klyukvin was born in Moscow as the son of a zemlyanin tavern keeper. His mother, Morana Kořinková, was a Moravian witch who was rumored to dabble in necromancy and the Dark Arts.

He developed a extensive criminal record during his teenage and early adult years for petty crimes and was in prison in 1917 when he was freed in February. He first joined the BK in 1918 and the Zhnetsy in 1920, where he quickly became one of the associates of Lyudmila Vishnevskaya. Due to the increasing ill health of Marena Kulchytskaya and Devana Zalischenko, Vishnevskaya found it easy to fill the upper ranks of the Lysaya Gora office with her own proteges, including Klyukvin.

The defectors, Saule Menulisovna Raudonaite, Sahakyan, and Vladimir Andreyevich Samochvalenko, all had numerous unflattering things to say about Klyukvin and his character in their memoirs, describing him as a corrupt and sadistic criminal. Raudonaite and Sahakyan both alleged that Klyuvkin and Vishnevskaya had been lovers since 1921 and that he was the actual father of her only daughter, Anfisa Askaniyevna Levandovskaya. 

Following Vishnevskaya’s removal as the head of the Zhnetsy, Klyukvin was himself fired in the spring of 1937 and arrested two weeks later. He was accused of participating in the conspiracy in the Zhnetsy alongside the likes of Milica Malinina and Alena Cheremisina and executed 20 September 1937.

Efah Saulovna Leichenberg (15 September 1892 – 31 October 1938) Leichenberg was the younger sister of Gavril Leichenberg. Like him, she had no formal education, but much of her early life is unclear. In any case, she first joined the BK in 1917 and was recruited into the Zhnetsy in 1921 by her brother and was stationed in the North Caucasus.

Unlike most of the other members of Alsu Zherebtsova’s clique, Leichenberg was never transferred away from the region and became the head of the North Caucasian Zhnetsy in 1933 and retained that position until 1938. For unclear reasons, in the summer of 1937, Leichenberg shocked Chernyshova and Medvednikov by collecting compromising materials on Zherebtsova and forwarding them to Lysaya Gora. These mostly consisted of claims that Zherebtsova had framed innocent people and was the cousin of the convicted traitor, Violetta Dmitryevna Solovieva; while both claims were true, they were not appreciated by Leichenberg’s superiors.

She was arrested 16 April 1938 and was reported to have died 31 October 1938. This was reported as having resulted from illness, but in her memoirs, Pelagiya Yuriyevna Vartanian (the second wife of Ksantip Kiprianovich Zelinsky) claimed that Leichenberg was tortured to death.

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Zhnetsy: Couples

Roman Nikitich Vyalitsyn and Nane Barsaminovna Aslanyan Vyalitsyn and Aslanyan first met in 1918 in Baku after she had been arrested by the Zhnetsy for taking part in an anti-BK rally. He managed to get her cleared of the charges, which were fairly circumstantial in any case. They began having an affair shortly after and she became pregnant, which was a problem because she was technically still married to one Arshavir Varuzhanovich Khachaturian. They had been estranged from each other for around two years, Aslanyan feared that if Khachaturian discovered her affair, he would use as a way to gain custody of their only child, Sarkis (b. 1914). Undaunted, Vyalitsyn solved this problem by murdering Khachaturian and making it look like an accident. Due to the ongoing Civil War, Khachaturian's death attracted little attention at the time, though it would later came back to haunt both of them.

At first, Vyalitsyn and Aslanyan's marriage was a fairly happy one, but it soured after he became jealous of his wife’s more successful career and was irrevocably damaged when their youngest son drowned in 1927. Though the memoirs of Valentina Vyalitsyna, Vyalitsyn’s daughter by his first wife, make it clear that her father had often been violent toward her stepmother (and her brothers, for that matter) before this point, it escalated after her half-brother's accidental death. Vyalitsyn himself died in the spring of 1930 and while no one much cared at the time, Armazi Vashadze and Shushanik Kasparian both became suspicious of the circumstances of Vyalitsyn’s death after their  falling out with Aslanyan around 1935. After her own arrest in 1954, Aslanyan admitted that she'd begun poisoning him in January 1930 because he'd repeatedly threatened to murder all of her children while forcing her to watch.

Germes Iosifovich Saranchin and Milica Bogdanovna Malinina Saranchin and Malinina were first introduced to each other as teenagers by their mutual friend, Orifiya Borislavna Zhovnirenko, while all three were students at Koldovstortez. They only became a couple, however, as adults after they joined the Zhnetsy in 1919 and 1920, respectively. The defector Zhnets, Zlata Bogdanovna Sorokina, was a friend of Saranchin and the memoirs of her son, Vsevolod Vladislavich Kargin, paint a vivid picture of the pair: Malinina was the dominant one in the relationship and an incorrigible flirt while Saranchin was almost masochistically devoted to her. Kargin further wrote that while it was doubtful that Malinina ever seriously considered leaving her husband, he was often consumed with the fear that she would, because he firmly believed she was too good for him.

Life for them seemingly took an abrupt turn after their patron, Lyudmila Vyacheslavna Vishnevskaya, was sacked as head of the Zhnetsy in 1936 and Malinina was transferred to Belarus. Then, unexpectedly, she was arrested 4 April 1937 and repeatedly tortured to get her to confess that Vishnevskaya had been involved in conspiracy and espionage. Saranchin chose not to object to his wife's arrest, but left their two sons in the care of his sister-in-law, Lyudmila, because they kept asking him where their mother was. He was transferred to Siberia a month later and Malinina was executed 8 November 1937. Saranchin was himself arrested 4 July 1938 and promptly had a mental breakdown in prison, as he was consumed with guilt about having betrayed Zhovnirenko and his “darling Mílochka”.

Meanwhile, though he was supposed to have been executed shortly after, the then deputy head of the Zhnetsy, Melanippa Ippolitovna Chernyshova, apparently forgot that he, Izmail Yakovlevich Arkhipienka, and Viktor Arkhipovich Baltais (among others) were still alive and only remembered after returning from the Far East that fall, after which she quickly had them executed on 15 September 1938. Saranchin and Malinina’s two sons were exiled to Uzbekistan in the summer of 1938 with their maternal cousin, but both boys were arrested again in 1947 and disappeared afterwards.

Alena Torkanovna Cheremisina and Melanippa Ippolitovna Chernyshova [See here]

Svyatoslav Rostislavich Rozanov and Syuzanna Malakhiyichna Landysheva [See here]

Lyudovik Karlovich Kardos and Despina Lazarevna Sobakina [See here]

Miloslav Vyacheslavich Klyukvin and Lyudmila Vyacheslavna Vishnevskaya Klyukvin and Vishnevskaya seem to have first met in 1920, around the same time that he joined the Zhnetsy and became one of her associates. She had been married since 1916 to Askaniy Diogenovich Levandovsky, one of the many brothers of Nestor Levandovsky, but began an affair with Klyukvin around 1921 or 1922. The former Zhnets, Khosrov Arshakovich Sahakyan, who defected in 1930, first exposed their relationship n his tell-all book. This was echoed in the memoirs of another defector, Saule Menulisovna Raudonaite (who had harbored an especial dislike from Vishnevskaya for many years) and she also alleged that Vishnevskaya's daughter, Anfisa, was actually a bastard fathered by Klyukvin. Though many of the claims of Sahakyan and Raudonaite are dismissed as pure sensationalism, a relationship between Vishnevskaya and Klyukvin are generally accepted as fact.

Regardless, their relationship seems to have cooled by mid-1920s and Vishnevskaya embarked on a new affair with Mircha Perunovich Zelenko. Regardless, Klyukvin, Vishnevskaya, and Zelenko were all arrested at different points in 1937 and accused of having been plotting a coup together with numerous others. Klyukvin was executed 25 September 1927 in a large of other Zhnetsy that included Orifiya Zhovnirenko, but Vishnevskaya and Zelenko were both put on trial together with a large of group their supposed co-conspirators, including Anfisa Krupina, Nestor Voinov, and Alena Cheremisina and were executed in the early morning hours of 21 March 1938. Vishnevskaya’s children were both arrested and sent to Vyraj. Her son volunteered to fight in the GWW and was killed in 1942, but her daughter was released in 1956. She lobbied for her mother’s rehabilitation, but without success. 

Sergei Arkadyevich Dolohov and Libuše Slavíková Dolohov and Slavikova (whose name is often Russified as Lyubov Mstislavna Slavikova) are most famous in the Western world for having been the parents of Death Eater, Antonin Dolohov.  In her memoirs, their colleague, Fekla Ponomarenko described as a close and loving couple and fanatical Kostovists. Originally from Tatarstan, they were both transferred to Lysaya Gora during the Great Harvest, but both were some of the few spared after Aslanyan took over. Dolohov and another Zhnets, Erato Arshakovna Aznavourian, were among those killed in action in 1943 as agent working for Grindelwald.

Slavikova continued to work in the poisons and curses department, but grew increasingly disillusioned with Kostov and secretly thought that the Domovoy Conspiracy was proof that he was losing his mind. She was forcibly retired from the Zhnetsy and set up with a large pension in 1954 after the arrest of her main patron, Aslanyan. Their only son, Anton, secretly defected shortly after and took the name Antonin to honor his mother’s Czech heritage.

Yuri Dmitriyevich Astapienia and Fekla Mitrofanovna Ponomarenko Astapienia and Ponomarenko first met in 1934 while serving as foreign agents in France. Though they were both married, they fell in love and began having an affair with each other, much to the displeasure of their superior, Zlata Sorokina. Sorokina had Ponomarenko sent back to the USSR in January 1935 after it became apparent that she was pregnant. She had twin daughters, Zinadia and Filonella, in May of that year who used the surname and patronymic of her husband, Genrikh Semyonovich Kukushkin, though they had been living apart for several years.

Afterwards, they both continued to work both together and apart in intelligence work. During the Great Harvest, Astapienia was part of the operations that assassinated Lamia Dionisyevna Panterova (eldest daughter of the terrorist, Olimpiya Feodorovna Zmeyeva) and kidnapped the former VSDP Auror, Anatoly Apollonovich von Hahn, while Ponomarenko was responsible for assassinating the two leaders of the OKS, Kserksy Kirovych Sokolenko and Danica Svjatoslavina Tkachenko. In 1940, they both given the honor of organizing the assassination of Oksana Iosifovna Lutsenko and her only surviving son, Vitaly. Kostov was thrilled at their success and showered them with awards.  Shortly after, Ponomarenko became pregnant again and gave birth to a son in April 1941. After discovering estranged wife's second pregnancy, Kukushkin finally decided that he'd had enough and formally filed for divorce in January 1941.

Both were active in sabotage and partisan work throughout the Global Wizarding War, but Astapienia later came under suspicion during the so-called Domovoy Conspiracy (a supposed plot by non-humans to destroy the wizarding Soviet Union from within) on account of his Mavka ancestry and was arrested along with his sister, Anfisa. He was feared after Kostov's death in June 1953, but he and Ponomarenko were both arrested again after the downfall of their patron, Aslanyan, and given prison sentences of 13 and 15 years, respectively. It was a condition of their releases in 1967 and 1969 that they never speak to each other again.

Svarog Borisovich Myasnikov and Dzerassae Dzantemirovna Dzhioyeva [see here]

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Valery Vsevolodovich Medvednikov (22 April 1890 – 20 March 1940)

Early Life Medvednikov's mother was a madam, innkeeper, fence, witch, and con artist, Frina Vsevolodovna Medvednikova, who was an ethnic Russian who lived in Lithuania. His biological father was a Lithuanian zemlyanin named Vilhelmas Vilkas, with him his mother had a one night stand, though he used the patronymic of his maternal grandfather. When he was four, his mother became involved with the Latvian squib, Pērkons Udritis, who served as his father figure, even though Udritis and Frina never actually married. Family lore held that one of his great-great-grandfather had angered a Hag who put on a curse on the family that would cause them to never live past the age of 50.

He had no formal education, as his family could not afford Koldovstortez’s fees and instead found menial work as a teenager as a tailor and in a cauldron factory. He only joined the BK in the spring of 1917. During the Civil War, he worked as a clerk in the Auror’s office, but moved into other work after the end of the war. His superior in the 1920s was Yakov Naumovich Yablochkov (brother of the Zhnets, Yeva Naumovna Yablochkova), who regarded Medvednikov as kind-hearted, a hard worker, and an ideal comrade.

During this period, he became drinking buddies with Svarozhich Svarogovich Kuznetsov and Vera Sergeyevna Podgornova after apparently them both at a gay bar. He had been married to Maria Aleksandrovna Shveikina since 1917, but the marriage was one of convenience. He divorced her in 1929 after meeting journalist, Srebrenka Veselinovna Sorokina, who was from a wealthy Pureblood Jewish family from Odessa, and happened to be the cousin of Zlata Bogdanovna Sorokina and the former sister-in-law of Olivera Lazarevna Kargina. They had no children of their own, but they adopted Srebrenka's two orphaned sororal nieces, Milica and Anastasia. Their home was also shared with Medvednikov’s adult niece and nephews, Olimpiya, Vyacheslav, Vladimir, and Vsevolod.

Medvednikov first came to Afanasiy Kostov’s attention around 1930, likely after they were introduced by Miroslava Vseslavevna Volkova. Things shifted abruptly, however, in the spring of 1934 with the deaths of both Marena Volosovna Kulchytskaya and Dariy Kserksovich Mironov. Though not a member of the Zhnetsy, Medvednikov became one of the lead investigators into the matter and seems to have fully believed that both were the result of a conspiracy by followers of the former Vedma of Ledenets, Zaria Kresnikovna Krasavkina. He repeatedly clashed with the head of the Zhnetsy, Lyudmila Vyacheslavna Vishnevskaya, who was far more skeptical of the idea of a mass conspiracy.

To satiate his claims of a mass conspiracy, she and Milica Bogdanovna Malinina decided in the summer of 1936 to link their own former agent, Alisa Genrikhovna Zakite, with a suppressed Lutsenkoist dissident group centered around Germes Afinodorovich Golubtsov. Despite their attempts to limit it, the followers of Krasavkina and Yefrem Iosifovich Levandovsky also got added to this supposed terrorist group, as did Oksana Lutsenko and three of her four sons. Despite this, Vishnevskaya was sacked shortly after this show trial anyway.

Zhnetsy Chief There were several reasons why Kostov appointed Medvednikov as the new Zhnetsy head, but chief among them was that he regarded Medvednikov as his protegee. Another reason was that Kostov thought a man might be able to better control the still-heavily female dominated Zhnetsy, whose organization by the 1930s, was a hotbed intrigue and backstabbing on account of the growing infirmity of Kulchytskaya and Devana Zalischenko and the general unpopularity and perceived incompetence of their de-facto leader, Vishnevskaya. His main partners in his reform of the Zhnetsy were the North Caucasus group, once led by Alsu Andreyevna Zherebtsova. He had first met Zherebtsova and her then first deputy, Melanippa Ippolitovna Chernyshova, in the mid-1920s and had remained on good terms with them since them.

A stranger to the Zhnetsy, Medvednikov had little respect for tendency toward its insular protectiveness and happily ordered the arrests of hundreds of current former and members, as well as masses of other members of the BK and ordinary people. He underwent a sudden personality charge in this period, becoming known as cruel, sadistic, brutal, and paranoid. Among his most notorious deeds are keeping a wig from the hair of the half-veela Krasavkina in his office and personally assisting in the torture Vishnevskaya; her partner, Mircha Perunovich Zelenko; and the Auror, Merkuriy Ilyich Znamenshchikov. He also gloried in having ordered the arrests of former members of the SK, Sidabraite, Korovchenko, Ledus, Lisitsyna, and Mrozhek, and the three remaining so-called Black Crones, Kalnietyte, Krukovskaya, and Liepa, and having the latter three executed together. This period of time is now known as the Great Harvest, after a poem composed by Kalliopa Zinovyevna Chernenko.

Disgrace The fall of Medvednikov and his group is often reckoned to have began in the spring of 1938. Zherebtsova was terminated from her position as the Vedma of the North Caucasus and transferred to Lysaya Gora. By this point, Medvednikov was exhausted and sinking deeper in alcoholism and what order there is Nawia was being imposed by Zherebstova and Chernyshova, both of whom perceived that they were losing their grip on power and Kostov’s favor and blamed Medvednikov personally for it. The defections of his personal friend, Grigori Lukyanovich Alatyrtsev, and his wife’s cousin, Zlata Sorokina, only added to the growing suspicions around him. What was more, most of the other members of the Sovet Koldunov were growing very tired of the ongoing purge and wanting to end it. In particular, Medvednikov gained the ire of both the powerful Svarog Zhelezov and Miroslava Volkova by threatening them with arrest. Both were not amused and intrigued to crush him like a bug, which they found easy to do, as they were both more intelligent and subtle than he. He also made another powerful and intelligent enemy by building a case against the Vedma of the Transcaucasus, Nane Aslanyan. Instead of following his superior’s orders, the head of the Transcaucasian Zhnetsy, Sanasar Barsamian, tipped off his long-time patroness, who immediately traveled to Lysaya Gora to plead her case with Kostov himself.

At the suggestion of Volkova, Kostov transferred Chernyshova to the Commissariat of Magical Sports and Games and transferred Nane Aslanyan from the South Caucasus to take her place as Deputy. After arriving in Lysaya Gora with most of her people (known as the Caucasian Mafia), Aslanyan began ordering arrests of Medvednikov’s people. In response, Melinoye Zinovyevna Saparenko attempted to flee, Syvne Morozkovna Snegova committed suicide, and Olivera Kargina attempted suicide by cutting her own throat. Sorokina and his niece, Olimpiya, both killed themselves on 1 December 1938, one day after he was officially replaced as the head of the Zhnetsy, and sent him an owl advising him to the do the same. He, however, ignored this advice and turned to drink for comfort.

Medvednikov was himself arrested 30 April 1939, on the same day as Chernyshova. He was at first defiant, but instead chose to confess when confronted with the notorious “breakers”, Boris Pytorovich Vovchenko and Natalia Valeryevna Voronova. His confession, stored in the Zhnetsy’s archives, was bitter and angry and instead blamed his former associates for everything that happened and complained about how they were probably mostly traitors and spies all along. He, Zherebstova, and Chernyshova were all excused of having framed and executed innocent people (which was very much true) and plotting to get Chernyshova’s brother-in-law, Gavril Saulovich Leichenberg to assassinate Kostov and most of the SK (which was not). He was executed 20 March 1940, though this was not publicly announced. He was 49-years-old.

His three nephews were all executed after his death, as was his older stepsister, Mara Perunovna Vydrina, while his young stepsister, Diana, was arrested and sent to Vyraj. His mother and half-sisters were already deceased, but the Sorokin and Kargin families were decimated, though Srebrenka’s nieces, age 14 and 12, were both sent to an orphanage. As adults in the 1960s, they both lobbied for their adopted father/uncle's rehabilitation, but were denied.

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Name Meanings: Medvednikov’s Inner Circle

Alsu Andreyevna Zherebtsova (11 April 1885 – 15 March 1940) Head of the North Caucasus Zhnetsy, 1923–1930. Vedma of the North Caucasus, 1934–1938. 

Viktor Arkhipovich Baltais (9 June 1888 – 15 September 1938) Head of the Ledenets Zhnetsy, 1934–1936. Head of the Lysaya Gora Zhnetsy, 1936–1937. 

Ksantip Kiprianovich Zelinsky (30 October 1889 – 10 March 1940) Head of the Siberian Zhnetsy, 1936–1938.

Melanippa Ippolitovna Chernyshova (4 January 1892 – 20 March 1940) First Deputy of the North Caucasus Zhnetsy, 1924–1927. Head of the Kazakhstan Zhnetsy, 1932–1934. Deputy Head of the Zhnetsy, 1935–1938.

Sigizmund Ivanovich Sobiesky (10 August 1885 – 28 February 1940) Head of the Transcaucasus Zhnetsy, 1928–1930. Head of the Ukraine Zhnetsy, 1930–1934. Head of the Kazakhstan Zhnetsy, 1938.

Kronos Dmitrievich Geyer (24 December 1886 – 5 December 1937) Head of the Ukraine Zhnetsy, 1924–1930 & 1934–1937.

Minfa Akheloyevna Zabrodina (29 January 1891 – 20 March 1940) Head of Counterintelligence, 1937–1938. 

Olivera Lazarevna Kargina (3 March 1892 – 10 March 1940) Head Overseer of Vyraj, 1936–1938.

Grigori Lukyanovich Alatyrtsev (29 April 1894 – unknown) Head of the Far East Zhnetsy, 1937–1938. 

Melinoye Zinovyevna Sapranenko (17 October 1896 – 10 February 1940) Head of the Ukraine Zhnetsy, 1937–1938. 

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Name Meanings: Zhnetsy, Vishnevskaya loyalists

Lyudmila Vyacheslavovna Vishnevskaya (26 October 1885 – 21 March 1938) Head of the Zhnetsy, 1934–1936.

Orifiya Borislavovna Zhovnirenko (18 August 1889 – 10 September 1937) Co-deputy head of the Zhnetsy, 1934–1936.

Milica Bogdanovna Malinina (31 March 1891 – 8 November 1937) Co-deputy head of the Zhnetsy, 1934–1936. Head of Byelorussia Zhnetsy, 1936–1938.

Germes Iosifovich Saranchin (6 October 1888 – 15 September 1938) Head of Counterintelligence, 1935–1937.

Velonia Volosovna Kukulka (18 January 1891 – 15 April 1938) Overseer of Vyraj, 1930–1936. Sister of Karna Volosovna Kukulka.

Sigizmund Karolovich Markevich (4 May 1896 – 3 March 1938) Deputy head of Foreign Intelligence, 1934 –1936. Head of Foreign Intelligence, 1937–1938.

Alena Torkanovna Cheremisina (10 July 1890 – 21 March 1938) Vishnevskaya’s personal secretary.

Karna Volosovna Kukulka (9 May 1895 – 24 March 1939) Deputy Head of Foreign Intelligence.

Söyembikä Timurovna Akhmatova (14 April 1889 – c. April 1934) Deputy head of Ledenets Zhnetsy.

Kupala Perunovna Leszczyna (6 July 1891 – 3 December 1937)

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Heads of Vyraj

Velonia Volosovna Kukulka (18 January 1891 – 15 April 1938) Head of Vyraj, 1930 – October 1936

[See here]

Olivera Lazarevna Kargina (3 March 1892 – 10 March 1940) Head of Vyraj, November 1936 – October 1938

[See here]

Vesna Yaroslavna Zhavoronkova (20 March 1895 – 21 June 1960) Head of Vyraj, November 1938 – December 1945

Zhavoronkova was born to a family of broomstick makers from Perm. She first joined the BK in 1919 and the Zhnetsy in 1921. She was assigned to Azerbaijan in 1925 and there came a favourite of the future Vedma of the region, Asena Zaurovna Aslanova, the best friend and sister-in-law of the notorious Nane Aslanyan. She was appointed as the head of Vyraj de facto by Aslanyan, though Valery Medvednikov (at least on paper) signed off on it. Though just as cruel as Kargina, Zhavoronkova was more competent than her predecessor and determined to improve productivity, even though that never quite manifested.

In 1939, she and her cousin, Zoria Anatolyevna Zhavoronkova, organized the murders of Lyudovik Ul’rixovich Nemeczek and Svetovid Svarogovich Zolotarev with the assistance of two inmates, Melinoye Spiridonovna Schwarzkopf and Boris Olegovich Medvedenko. Schwarzkopf seduced Nemeczek and then stabbed him to death while Medvedenko beat Zolotarev to death with the help of an accomplice. Though portrayed at the time as Lutsenkoist sympathizers, Schwarzkopf and Medvedenko were actually former professional criminals from Ledenets who had been arrested in the spring of 1934 due to their acquaintance with Maria Iosifovna Kovalskaya, the assassin of Marena Volosovna Kulchytskaya, and they had committed the murders as part of a bargain with the Zhavoronkovas to get their sentences reduced. (This promise was not fulfilled and instead both Schwarzkopf and Medvedenko were executed in 1940.)

Zoria became the head of the Ledenets Zhnetsy afterwards as a reward, but both of them were themselves arrested in the fall of 1950 by Svarog Borisovich Myasnikov and accused of involvement in the Ledenets affair (a supposed conspiracy centered around Dobrynya Nikitich Porozov and Zhiva Yarilovna Chereshkova). They both refused to admit guilt, despite being repeatedly tortured, and were instead given long sentences in prison. However, Zoria was retried two months later and executed. Vesna was ostensibly freed briefly from prison in 1954 after the Ledenets affair was unmasked as a fabrication, but was immediately sent back due to her association with Aslanyan.

In 1956, the new head of the Zhnetsy, Artyom Akteonovich Lovtsevich, briefly pulled her out of prison to interview her about the exact fates of Nemeczek, Zolotarev, and Tsovinar Aramazdovna Zafranian. She admitted to having orchestrated the murders of the first two with Zoria and that she’d had the third executed in 1942 on the orders of Aslanyan and Andronik Nikiforovich Orlov, as Zafranian had outlived her usefulness. 

Zhavoronkova killed herself in prison in 1960 by poisoning and left behind a rambling suicide note proclaiming herself a loyal daughter of the Revolution and complaining about she’d been framed by conspiracies. Her nephew, Yaromir Georgiyevich Zhavoronkov, and Fekla Mitrofanovna Ponomarenko have both propagated the conspiracy theory that she was actually murdered on the orders of Vasilisa Minosovna Morozenko, but this theory has met with little acceptance from scholars. 

Anastasiya Hesperovna Kozodoeva (22 December 1901 – 7 August 1979) Head of Vyraj, January 1946 – November 1953

Kozodoeva was born in the Volga into a poor, Halfblood family. Much of her early life is obscure, other than she first joined the Auror office as a secretary in 1919. She was transferred to the Zhnetsy in 1922 and stationed in Tatarstan. In 1933, she began working as a guard in Vyraj before being transferred to the Lysaya Gora office in 1939. In 1946, Avdotya Spiridonovna Pastukhova and Svarog Borisovich Myasnikov had her appointed as the new head of Vyraj to displace Zhavoronkova, who was regarded as a creature of Aslanyan.

Unlike the more flamboyant Kukulka, Kargina, and Zhavoronkova, Kozodoeva is a highly enigmatic figure, who spent most of her time time as the head of Vyraj trying to come up with semi-plausible reasons to extend the sentences of political prisoners at the behest of her superiors. Her only noteworthy action was honestly informing Aslanyan after the death of Kostov in June 1953 that the current system was not sustainable and that she and her predecessors had constantly lied to the Sovet Koldunov about its productivity to preserve their heads.

Afterwards, she gratefully resigned as head in November 1953 and transferred to a position overseeing protections for diplomats. Being politically unattached, she survived the downfalls of Aslanyan and Myasnikov and even Pastukhova and Lovtsevich. She retired from the Zhnetsy in 1966 and lived the rest of her life in obscurity, dying of an illness in 1979. 

Ilifiya Zinoviyevna Lelechenko (25 July 1904 – 14 May 1997) Head of Vyraj, December 1953 – January 1960

Lelechenko was a Halfblood from the Ukraine. Her father was a zemylanin farmer while her mother was a witch and midwife. She first joined the propaganda department of the Zhnetsy in 1922 and held numerous minor posts between then and 1944 when she was made the head of the Kazakhstan branch.

She was appointed Head of Vyraj in 1953 and asked to produce a report about the conditions there. The report took three months to produce, but basically confirmed what her predecessor, Kozodoeva, had said. Afterwards, Lelechenko began the slow process of demolishing the system and either transferring the prisoners to prisons or freeing them.

In the process of doing so, she uncovered accounts of extreme cruelty by the guards that both Kargina and Zhavoronkova had swept under the rug. Some of these accounts were then used to push a criminal case after the latter, who had been imprisoned on other charges since 1951. She resigned from the Zhnetsy after the closing down of Vyraj in 1960 and instead found work as a translator. She retired in 1966 and afterwards returned to Ukraine where she died in 1997.

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Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Zhnetsy, part 3

Leila Arkadyevna Pugacheva (March 1813 – 30 April 2009) Known as “the Night Hag”, Pugacheva was a Ukrainian half-vampire. It was initially uncertain how old she actually was; she variously gave her year of birth variously as 1884, 1892, 1894, and 1902. In the mid-1950s, after her second escape from prison, it was discovered that she had been a persistent thorn in the side of the Volshebny Duma as far back as the 1830s and ‘40s, with a fondness for tormenting and killing Zemlyane, especially children, for her own amusement. After being recaptured in 1957, she admitted to having been born after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire and her father was a Zemlyanin French colonel that her mother seduced and then killed.

Regardless, Pugacheva began working for the Zhnetsy unofficially in 1931 and was one of those sent to Ledenets in the spring 1934 to root out the supposed conspiracy behind the deaths of M.V. Kulchytskaya and D.K. Mironov and was transferred to Lysaya Gora in 1937. She was one of the few Zhnetsy who had served under V.V. Medvednikov who was retained by Nane. Aslanyan. During interrogations, Pugacheva worked primarily with Boris Vovchenko and Nataliya Voronova.

In 1950, she ran afoul of Svarog Borisovich Myasnikov and Dzerassae Dzantemirovna Dzhioyeva, who accused her of supporting a vampire insurrection and then in January 1952, she, Astapienia, and Vovchenko were arrested on account of their non-human ancestry. However, she broke out of prison in April 1952 and disappeared. Kostov was infuriated, saw this of proof of treason afoot and ordered that Myasnikov, Astapienia, and Vovchenko be tortured more vigorously and sent out hunts from the vanished Pugacheva that found nothing.

After the death of Kostov in June 1953, Aslanyan had her, Astapienia, and Vovchenko pardoned and she dutifully reappeared in mid-July, but claimed she’d escaped by seducing one of the sympathetic guards. In January 1954, however, she was rearrested after the fall of Aslanyan, but this new prison sentence lasted only slightly longer than the first. She disappeared again in April 1954, much to the embarrassment of A.A. Lovtsevich, who swore that she would be caught quickly, but he repeatedly failed. In 1956, however, it was finally worked out how she’d actually managed her two escapes: she was an unregistered owl animagus and escaped by blending in with the prison owls and flying away.

Pugacheva was finally caught again in 1957 after killing a group of Zemlyanin children and drinking their blood. Sentenced to life in prison (she was most likely spared execution simply because she’d begged for death) for crimes against the government, being an unregistered animagus, murder, and two prison escapes, Pugacheva was kept in a large cage to keep her from escaping again. The following year, she attempted suicide by clawing out her own throat. While recovering from the attempt, she attacked the healers and tried to infect them with vampirism so that she could earn a death sentence.

This wish was not granted, and instead, Pugacheva’s confinements were only tightened and she was put in a cage in near total darkness and allowed no human contact whatsoever. She initially spent her time cursing the people who had put her there, however, she eventually went mad and was often overheard carrying on detailed conversations with her long-dead colleagues. She finally died in 2009. 

Svyatoslav Rostislavich Rozanov (27 February 1888 – 26 March 1973) Rozanov was born in Moscow. He was one of twelve children of the witch, Agrafena Svyatoslavna Grushetskaya, by her three husbands. She had been a member of the Obshchina Ved’m i Volshebnikov since 1893 and educated her children herself at home, because she couldn’t afford Koldovstortez’s fees. Rozanov secretly joined the Imperial Russian army in 1914, but was arrested in 1916 for violating the rule of non-interference. He joined the BK in 1918 and the Zhnetsy in 1921. From the mid-1920s, he was assigned to foreign intelligence, mainly in Scandinavia, Germany, and Austria.

In 1924, he divorced his first wife, Melina Asklepiyevna Mindalova, by whom he had had two children, in favor of his fellow Zhnets, Syuzanna Landysheva. He and Landysheva were part of a group of Zhnetsy sent to the United States in October 1940 to gather intelligence and shush out the American magical congress' intentions toward Gellert Grindelwald and his army. Though his gathering of information was successful, he was intensely unpopular with his peers: Veniamin Isaakovich Einhorn, Vladimir Ivanovich Lauva, and Frina Mirtova all intensely disliked him and complained constantly to Nane Aslanyan back in Lysaya Gora that he was a reckless and overbearing tyrant.

In 1943, he was accused by Aslanyan of having been responsible for the leak that resulted in the death of a number of Zhnetsy in the Ukraine, including Sergei Arkadyevich Dolohov (father of the future Death Eater, Antonin Dolohov), but a investigation into the matter proved he was not responsible. He was discharged from service in the Zhnetsy in 1948, officially on grounds of ill health, but this was possibly only a pretext invented by Svarog Myasnikov, who was eager to purge the Zhnetsy of Aslanyan’s associates. Either way, Rozanov escaped repression and died in Lysaya Gora in 1973.

Syuzanna Malakhiyichna Landysheva (10 July 1894 – 15 August 1988) Landysheva was born in Bessarabia to a Halfblood family. She attended Durmstrang from 1904 until 1912 and afterwards move to Hungary where she married a Hungarian wizard named László Mészáros in 1914, but the marriage broke up in 1918.

She and her daughter, Virág (known in Russian as “Violetta Ladislavna Landysheva”) returned to the USSR in 1922 and she was recruited in 1925 by Yeva Naumovna Yablochkova and became an foreign agent of the Zhnetsy. In 1924, she remarried to Svyatoslav Rozanov and had two sons by him in 1926 and 1930.

Landysheva was sent to the Middle East with Yenokh Zakharevich Ovramenko in 1929 and turned him in to Yablochkova after he secretly met with Oksana Iosifovna Lutsenko and her family. From 1931 until 1936, Rozanov and Landysheva were stationed in France, Germany, and Austria where they spied on the activities of Gellert Grindelwald. In the 1940s, they were part of the team sent to the United States.

After the GWW, she continued intelligence work, despite the dismissal of Rozanov, but was forced into permanent retirement after the arrests of Nane Aslanyan and Fekla Ponomarenko in 1953 and 1954.

Boris Pytorovich Vovchenko (25 April 1895 – 20 July 1955) Vovchenko was born in the Cherkasy region of the Ukraine to a zemylanin father who worked as a tailor and a witch. He briefly attended Koldovstortez, but was expelled after contracting lycanthropy in 1909. His mother turned him out of the family home to protect herself and his siblings and he afterwards settled in Kiev where he found menial work, but constantly had to go AWOL during full moons.

He was arrested in 1914 by Aurors and kept in prison until 1917, when he escaped during the chaos of the Revolution. How he ended up in the Zhnetsy is unclear, but he was transferred to Lysaya Gora in 1937 on the recommendation of Viktor Arkhipovich Baltais, who had met Vovchenko in the Ukraine in the 1920s.

During interrogations, he usually worked alongside Leila Pugacheva and Nataliya Voronova. During the Great Harvest, among those unlucky enough to have been questioned by this trio included the writers, Genrikh Leopol’dovich Falkenrath, Yenokh Solomonovich Zamir, and Gavril Aronovich Zavadsky, and the former members of the Sovet Koldunov, Ledus, Lisitsyna, and Mrozhek.

However, Vovchenko was himself arrested in January 1952, on account his non-human ancestry. After being repeatedly tortured by Dzerassae Dzhioyeva, Vovchenko appeared to have been broken and wrote out a long and elaborate confession, where he confessed to being the lover of Grindelwald, Wilhelmina Tuft, and the American president of the magical congress; killing and eating six of Nataliya Voronova’s children with her consent (she had only one son who was still very much alive); encouraging goblin rebellions; and that he, Myasnikov and his fellow halfbreed Zhnetsy were working on a plot together to resurrect the long-dead Krasavkina, Krupina, Levandovsky, Lutsenko, and Voinov so that they could depose "the one who had killed them” and take his place as the rulers of the wizarding Soviet Union. For some reason, though, Kostov didn’t think this confession was entirely sincere and instead began to lose faith in Dzhioyeva.

After the death of Kostov in June 1953, Vovchenko was released from prison by the order of Aslanyan, but was rearrested in January 1954. Hoping to escape death, Vovchenko pretended to have gone mad, but the act was not believed and he was executed in July 1955.

Yuri Dmitriyevich Astapienia (29 April 1895 – 23 April 1983) Astapienia was born in Belarus to a Zemlyanin Belarusian father, but his maternal grandmother was a Mavka from the Ukraine. Because of the restrictions on halfbreeds in the Russian Empire, he had no formal education. In 1917, he married a Zemlyanin woman, Aleksandra Feodorovna Navitskaya, and had a daughter by her, but abandoned her in 1923 for the witch, Melina Asklepiyevna Mindalova, who had recently divorced her husband, S.R. Rozanov.

He joined in Zhnetsy in 1918 and became known as an exceptionally brutal operative. In 1931, he was transferred to the foreign intelligence wing of the Zhnetsy and served under Yeva Yablochkova and Karta Ozolina. In 1934, he and Fekla Ponomarenko served in France under Zlata Bogdanovna Sorokina. After Sorokina fled to parts unknown during the Great Harvest, Astapienia received her post in France. During this period, he helped a found a network of spies and informants from the United States to Japan.

After his return to the USSR, he and Ponomarenko possibly were involved the assassination of Viktor Vladimirovich Lutsenko, the oldest of Oksana Lutsenko’s four sons, and his second wife, Mila Lavrentiyevna Vishnova, in August 1938. A little less than two years later, they finally also managed to assassinate Oksana herself and her third and last surviving son, Vitaly, on 14 July 1940.

However, Astapienia later came under suspicion during the so-called Domovoy Conspiracy (a supposed plot by non-humans to destroy the wizarding Soviet Union from within) on account of his Mavka ancestry and was arrested along with his sister, Anfisa Dmitriyevna Astapienia. They were freed after the death of Kostov in 1953, but he was arrested again after the downfall of Aslanyan in 1954. Astapienia was sentenced to 13 years in prison and not released until 1967.

Aristogiton Filippovich Babunsky (18 July 1896 – 1 May 1982) Babunsky (born Aristogiton Babunski) was born in Macedonia to a Macedonian father and Ukrainian mother. His father, who owned a potions shop, died in 1905 and his mother did the best she could to keep it afloat to keep her children fed. Babunsky began attending Durmstrang in 1906, but dropped out in 1912. He became involved in revolutionary movements afterwards, but fled the country for the USSR in 1919. In 1920, while in Georgia, he met the Cappadocian Greek siblings, Garmodiy Levonovich Mirtov and Frina Levonovna Mirtova, and became Garmodiy’s lover.

In 1923, the three became informants for Georgia’s Zhnetsy, studied at Koldovstortez, and officially joined the Zhnetsy in 1929 as foreign agents. Babunsky and Mirtova were both the long-time contacts of Vasilisa Viktorovna Herzberg. During the Great Harvest, the two carried out assassination work.In October 1937, they assassinated the Zhnets defector, Olga Rogvolodovna Stieglitz, in Greece and dumped her body in the Acheron River and then helped kidnap the former VSDP Auror, Anatoly Apollonovich von Hahn, from Angers and smuggled him back to Lysaya Gora.

Babunsky was among those who accompanied Svarog Volosevich Zhelezov to meet with Grindelwald and his followers in 1941, along with the Khinchagova sisters and Sibil Thorosovna Iskenderian. He stayed behind in Germany and Austria with Iskenderian, even after she was recalled for bombarding the Sovet Koldunov with reports of imminent attack. During the GWW, he acted as an advisor to Fekla Ponomarenko and Yuri Astapienia and became a close friend of them and their families.

Babunsky was dismissed from the Zhnetsy in 1947 by Svarog Myasnikov for being a foreigner and “untrustworthy” and moved into research in the Commissariat of Mysteries. After the death of Kostov in 1932, Aslanyan intended to move part to foreign intelligence, but never got the chance as she was arrested that December.

Frina Levonovna Mirtova (10 January 1898 – 3 March 1972) Born “Phryne Myrtoglou”, Mirtova was a Cappadocian Greek witch. In 1920, she and her brother, Harmodios (or Garmodiy Mirtov), both fled from their homeland across the Black Sea to get away from the persecution ethnic Greeks were receiving at the time. They ended up in Georgia where they met Aristogiton Filippovich Babunsky, who became her brother’s lover. In 1923, Mirtova and Babunsky became informants for the local Zhnetsy and were invited to join in 1929 by Nane Aslanyan. Mirtova, her brother, and Babunsky then became foreign agents of the Zhnetsy in Europe. In the 1940s, she was sent to the United States with Rozanov and Landysheva, but things didn’t go well. Mirtova was one of the many Zhnetsy sent there who hated Rozanov and repeatedly clashed with him. The bickering was so intense that all they failed to notice the treachery of one of their informants, which meant that Aslanyan recalled several of them to Lysaya Gora and accused them of treason, but quickly figured out that their failures were due to stupidity rather than treason.

After the end of the Global Wizarding War, Mirtova quit intelligence for a desk job still under the supervision of Fekla Ponomarenko. After the downfall of Aslanyan, Mirtova was forced out of the Zhnetsy and became a worker in the Commissariat of Literature instead, primarily translating ancient Greek manuscripts and spellbooks. She continued to live with her brother and Babunsky until the day she died and never married.

Nataliya Valeryevna Voronova (25 December 1899 – 23 July 1956) Voronova was born in what is now the Novosibirsk Oblast in Siberia, where her father was a coal miner. Her father died in a mining accident in 1911 and her brothers were also to die fairly young. She and her sister were both taught magic by a local woman who recognized them to be witches, though they had no formal education. At 16, Voronova took also took up work as a coal carrier, which made her incredibly strong.

Her activities during the Revolution are unknown, but she became a member of the Siberian Zhnetsy in the late 1920s. In the mid-1930s, Voronova came to the attention of K.K. Zelinsky, who was based in Siberia. She was transferred to Lysaya Gora in 1937 as a junior interrogator and appears to have impressed Medvednikov and Zherebtsova with her exceptional brutality and sadism.

Voronova, however, had little loyalty to Medvednikov and so was spared after his replacement by Nane Aslanyan. She, Leila Pugacheva, and Vasily Lavrentiyevich Drozdov were given the honor of personally interrogating Medvednikov and Zherebtsova after their arrest, with Voronova and Drozdov doing the torturing while Pugacheva cheerfully asked the questions. The following year, she murdered Aslanyan’s loud-mouthed former sister-in-law, Anahit Khachaturian, and Anahit’s husband, Kopala Eliava, as well as political enemies of Asena Zaurovna Aslanova (Aslanyan’s best friend and former sister-in-law) in Azerbaijan.

She was dismissed from the Zhnetsy in 1949 by Svarog Myasnikov, who regarded her as one of Aslanyan’s creatures, and for this reason, she lived a little bit longer than most of her former co-workers, but was finally arrested in 1955 and executed in 1956. Voronova acted bored at her trial, though she occasionally made some snide remarks about how ridiculous the Sovet Koldunov’s pose of moral outrage at the behavior of her, Aslanyan, and the other Zhnetsy was when they had just as much blood as their hands.

In the mid-1960s, her son, Yefim, became a dissident and later emigrated to the UK where he wrote a book about his memories of his infamous mother. 

Fekla Mitrofanovna Ponomarenko (24 September 1904 – 25 January 1998) The daughter of a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, Ponomarenko first joined the Zhnetsy in 1923. In 1921, she married Genrikh Ivanovich Kukushkin, but the marriage quickly became strained and they stopped living together by the mid-1930s.

In 1934, Ponomarenko traveled to France with Zlata Sorokina and Yuri Astapienia. She and Astapienia were posing as a married couple and they became a bit too absorbed in their role and started having a genuine affair, even though both were married to other people. Sorokina found their behavior distasteful and had her dismissed from France in January 1935.

Afterwards, Ponomarenko was assigned to infiltrate the members of the OSK or “United Sons of Hulda”, who were suspected to have Grindelwald sympathies and kill their leaders, Kserksy Kirovych Sokolenko and Danica Svjatoslavina Tkachenko. She was considered ideal for this role as she spoke fluent Ukrainian and was also extremely familiar with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a priest’s daughter. She disguised herself as a man and used the name “Tymofiy Veniaminovych Pavlenko” and was able to worm her way into the good graces of Sokolenko and Tkachenko and successfully killed both of them.

She returned to Russia in the fall of 1938 and was reunited with Astapienia. Though both feared execution, they were spared and made the head and deputy of Foreign Intelligence by Nane Aslanyan so that could destroy what was left of the Lutsenko family.

After the end of the Global Wizarding War, Ponomarenko was briefly fired from the Zhnetsy, but was later reinstated. However, she was arrested shortly after the arrest of Nane Aslanyan and kept in prison for two years before being tried for numerous crimes and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. She was released in 1969 and lived in anonymity. Ponomarenko had three children during her lifetime, twin girls named Zinadia and Filonella in 1935 and a son named Filipp in 1941. They used the surname and patronymic of her estranged husband throughout their lives, but were probably actually fathered by Astapienia.

Her son, Filipp, became a historian and later defected from the USSR in the 1960s. After her death, her elder daughter, Zinadia, and grandson both published posthumous memoirs that Ponomarenko had dictated to them in the years before her death. The memoirs became a source of friction among her children, but that is another story.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Zhnetsy; Defectors

Khosrov Arshakovich Sahakyan (10 February 1889 – 29 September 1938) Sahakyan was born into a family of Armenian merchants in what’s now Krasnodar Krai. He completed his studies at Koldovstortez in 1906 and became an Auror in 1910. No fan of the Volshebny Duma, he received its collapse in 1917 with great joy. He was essentially a supporter of the Ministry that had been formed, but lost faith in them and say the BK as the most capable group, joining up with them in 1918. However, he only officially joined its ranks in 1920, shortly after joining the Zhnetsy. In 1924, he was assigned to work in Iran and worked alongside Yenokh Zakharevich Ovramenko. He was angered at the execution of Ovramenko in 1929 and defected from Turkey to Algeria in 1930.

While living in Algiers, he published a tell-all in French about the inner workings of the Zhnetsy that blew the cover of countless agents in the Middle East. However, most of the book consisted of sleazy gossip (for instance, that Afanasiy Kostov had ordered the murder of the Auror, Svetovid Vladimirovich Levchenko and that the two then-heads of the Zhnetsy, Marena Kulchytskaya and Devana Zalischenko, were lesbian lovers).

Sahakyan was killed in September 1938 in an operation led by Pulkheriya Arkadyevna Feodosiyeva, a Zhnets who had formerly been stationed in France with Zlata Sorokina and Yuri Dmitriyevich Astapienia. His body was never found, so his manner of death is unknown, though Saule Menulisovna Raudonaite, a personal secretary of Afanaisy Kostov who had defected in 1928, claimed that the unfortunate Sahakyan was fed alive to a Nundu.

Zlata Bogdanovna Sorokina (19 September 1889 – 8 March 1949) Zlata Sorokina was born in 1889 in Odessa into a wealthy Pureblood family of merchants. They were Jewish by lineage, but non-observant in terms of religion. Her son later claimed that their family had received the surname, Sorokin, because most of the members of the family had black hair with a white streak in it. She joined the Zhnetsy in 1925, in foreign intelligence, probably on the advice of her sister-in-law, Olivera Lazarevna Kargina, which was then under the supervision of Yeva Naumovna Yablochkova. Between 1926 and 1932, she spent most of her time abroad building intelligence connections.

She worked in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States before receiving a permanent assignment in 1934 in France with Yuri Astapienia and Fekla Mitrofanovna Ponomarenko. However, she almost immediately clashed with both of them, though the exact cause of this animosity is disputed. Part of it probably had something to do with Astapienia’s reputation for womanizing, which the staid Sorokina found distasteful. In 1935, she managed to have Ponomarenko dismissed as she had become pregnant, but found herself stuck with Astapienia.

In March 1938, Sorokina received news that her superior, Sigizmund Karolovich Markevich, had died of a sudden illness in Lysaya Gora. Already paranoid from hearing about the arrest and execution of her friend, Roksana Anatolyevna Cyhanenko, she completely panicked, boarded a ship with her two children, Vsevolod and Srebenka, on 17 April 1938, and sailed to Brazil, taking massive amounts of money with her. Before she defected, she wrote to Oksana Iosifovna Lutsenko, warning her that a woman, who used the code names “Marguerite” and “Rose”, in her eldest son’s inner circle was a spy (this woman was Vasilisa Viktorovna Herzberg, but Sorokina did not know her real name). Her defection caused a furor in the Zhnetsy’s foreign intelligence operations, and because she was a cousin of Medvednikov’s second wife, Srebrenka Veselinovna Sorokina, Kostov grew increasingly suspicious of him.

After arriving in Brazil, she and her children used the aliases, Urraca, Afonso, and Sancha Zolotoff, and purchased falsified identification that said as much. Sorokina’s life in exile was unhappy, especially after the death of her sickly daughter in 1942. Sorokina herself died seven years later at the age of 60. Her son, using the name Afonso Zolotoff, became the professor of Transfiguration at Castelobruxo in 1945. He married a Brazilian woman, Maria Dulce Ribeiro Jimenez, and had twin daughters, Ariana Dolores and Aurelia Felicia.

After the death of Afanasiy Kostov in June 1953, Afonso revealed his true identity and began using the name Vsevolod Vladislavovich Sorokin-Kargin. Shortly after, he released a book that he claimed were the collected memoirs of his late mother. Though a vivid and compelling read, it’s suspected that at least some of the book’s contents were fabricated by Sorokin-Kargin and much of what wasn’t fabricated was usually second-hand information Sorokina had received from her long-time friend, Germes Iosifovich Saranchin. For this reason, its information on the breaking of the defendants of the first trial is reasonably accurate, but much of the rest of it is hearsay and rumor.

Olga Rogvolodovna Stieglitz (11 July 1893 – October 1937) Stieglitz was ethnic Pole (Jewish mother, Catholic father) from Silesia. She attended Durmstrang instead of Koldovstortez and there befriended the three Samochvalenko brothers. After completing their studies in 1910, they all moved to Austria. In 1908, she married Iziaslav Andreyevich Samochvalenko and they had a daughter, Stanislava, in 1918. She was probably recruited into the foreign service of the Zhnetsy after a mutual friend introduced her to Vanda Krukovskaya and Kulchytskaya. She lived abroad during her service, in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, and was known to have been a friend of Lyudovik Ulʹrixovich Nemeczek and the four Zelenko siblings.

In 1932, Stieglitz and her family were sent to Romania, where she had contact with numerous Zhnetsy, including Svyatoslav Rostislavich Rozanov, Syuzanna Malakhiyichna Landysheva, and Yenokh Zakharevich Ovramenko, and her superior in Lysaya Gora during this period was Saule Austarasovna Raudonaite (not to be confused with her cousin, the defector, Saule Menulisovna Raudonaite). Her husband died in 1935, but she continued to write frequently to her brother-in-law, Vladimir, who was stationed in the Netherlands. Both of them were upset by the show trial of their mutual friend, Nemeczek. When news of the arrest of seven prominent Aurors was announced, Stieglitz apparently reached her breaking point. When she received summons to return to Russia in August 1937, she refused them. Instead, she wrote an article denouncing Afanasiy Kostov as a tyrant who signed off on the executions of countless innocent people and revealed that one of the defendants at the first show trial, Alisa Genrikhovna Zakite, had actually worked for the Zhnetsy for years.

She and her daughter then fled to Greece. After spending two months in hiding, she sent Stanislava to the Netherlands, where her former brother-in-law, Vladimir, was stationed, but dared not go herself. In unclear circumstances, she was tracked down in northern Greece by the Zhnetsy assassins, Aristogiton Filippovich Babunsky and Frina Levonovna Mirtova in October 1937, murdered, and her corpse thrown into the Acheron River. Stanislava safely reached the Netherlands and fled to France with her uncle and later, to the United States.

Vladimir Andreyevich Samochvalenko (15 July 1893 – 20 March 1942) Samochvalenko was born into a Halfblood family of ethnic Ukrainian origins in what was then Galicia in the empire of Austria-Hungary. He and his older brother, Iziaslav, met Olga Stieglitz while they were studying at Durmstrang and they became friends, eventually moving to Vienna together. He joined the BK in 1919 and later became part of the Zhnetsy’s foreign intelligence operations in 1920. From 1925 onwards, he was based in Germany, Poland, Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland and before being transferred semi-permanently to the Netherlands in 1936.

In 1937, his niece, Stanislava, arrived and informed him that her mother had defected and denounced Afanasiy Kostov and his inner circle (chiefly, Sevastyan Ryndin, Miroslava Volkova, and Svarog Zhelezov) as a gang of self-serving thugs who knowingly framed the innocent. After hearing of Olga’s murder that fall, Samochvalenko, Stanislava, and his long-time lover, Aleksey Ivanovich Antonov, fled to France, where they made contact with Viktor Lutsenko and the small group around him, but were unable to prevent his suspicious death in 1938. Afraid of their lives, the three then fled to the United States. Though Yseult Raguenel, Viktor’s ex-wife, believed that Vasilisa Herzberg and Darya Al’bertovna Sirsnina were responsible for his death, Sirsinina instead tried to lay blame on Samochvalenko in her letters to the last two surviving Lutsenkos, as his ties to the Zhnetsy were far more well-known.

Samochvalenko, his niece, and Antonov took up residence in Washington. He wrote an account of his time in the Zhnetsy in 1939, that included numerous details about the countless intrigue that had been afoot in the Zhnetsy over the past ten years, particularly, the undying hatred between Lyudmila Vishnevskaya and Alsu Andreyevna Zherebtsova and the fall-out from that. His book was also first mention that Zaria Krasavkina had been scalped after her execution at Medvednikov’s request and a wig was made out of her famous white gold hair, which he then prominently displayed in his office. Samochvalenko also correctly predicted that Kostov’s three chief instruments for the Great Harvest —Medvednikov, Zherebtsova, and Melanippa Chernyshova— would not live longer than a year.

Samochvalenko himself died mysteriously in February 1942 while visiting California. His death was officially ruled a suicide, but his niece, Stanislava, insisted until her own dying day that he was murdered.

Grigori Lukyanovich Alatyrtsev (1894 – unknown) [see here]

[nanshe-of-nina]

Wizarding Russian Empire and USSR || Nane Aslanyan (5 April 1893 – 25 March 1954)

Childhood and Early Life

Nane Aslanyan was born in Georgia into an Armenian family. Her father, Barsamin Aramazdovich Aslanyan, was originally from central Cilicia and a member of a minor Old Pureblood family, but he had moved to Georgia as a young man and married her mother, Ashkhen Soghomonyan, who lived in Abkhazia. Aslanyan had younger twin brothers, who both died young, and a sister, Anahit, who was two years older. Her father died when she was ten and she and her sister were thereafter raised by their mother, a pious follower of the Armenian Apostolic faith, who were determined that her two daughters were going to get a good education.

From 1904 until 1912, Aslanyan attended Koldovstoretz where she particularly excelled in Potions and Transfiguration. While an excellent student, in hindsight, some of her classmates seemed to think that there was something slightly off about her, but had trouble putting their finger on what. Regardless, though her paternal uncle, Vahagn Aramazdovich Aslanyan had been a member of the Shabash Volshebnikov since 1897, there is no proof that Aslanyan or her sister shared his interest in revolutionary politics.

She was arrested in March 1918 in Astrakhan after a mass arrest of young people who were gathered an anti-revolutionary rally. However, she won the sympathies of the Zhnets, Roman Nikitich Vyalitsyn, who went out of his way to save her by appealing to Armazi Vashadze. She and Vyalitsyn married in December 1918 and their first son was born in July 1919. This arrest and the fact of her uncle’s political affiliations were later used to raise grave doubts about Aslanyan’s loyalty, but how much truth there was to such accusations is unclear.

Career in the Zhnetsy

In February 1920, Aslanyan joined the Zhnetsy on the advice of her third husband who thought she'd be good at it, partially because, unlike most of the Caucasian Zhnetsy at the time, she was fluent in Georgian, Azeri, and Armenian.

Aslanyan’s service in the Zhnetsy was distinguished and she was noted early on as an intelligent and thorough operative, skilled at gathering intelligence. She first came to Afanasiy Kostov’s attention in 1925 when she was one of the main operatives who foiled an assassination attempt on the entire Sovet Koldunov by disgruntled goblins, and was awarded a medal for it by the Black Crone, Vanda Kazimirovna Krukovskaya.  By 1926, Aslanyan had become the head of the Georgian branch of the Zhnetsy. Around the same time, she was personally introduced to Afanasiy Kostov by their mutual friend, Shusanik Vlasiyevna Kasparian.

In 1932, Kostov appointed Aslanyan as the Vedma of the South Caucasus, with the approval of Vashadze and Kasparian, and she began to spend much of her free time with Kostov, his children, and Kasparian’s family. However, her good relationships with Vashadze and Kasparian did not last and whatever affection they may have once had for each other was dead by 1934.

A further wrinkle that caused them both alarm was the unexpected death of Aslanyan’s fourth husband, Amiran Arveladze in April 1935, which meant that, in two decades, Aslanyan had had no less than four husbands who kept dying of mysterious illnesses. Vashadze and Kasparian repeatedly tried to bring this issue to Kostov’s attention, but unfortunately for them, he was thoroughly bored by the subject of Aslanyan's checkered marital history, especially in the wake of Marena Kulchytskaya’s assassination, because she was far too useful to him and, at any rate, most of his attention was on destroying his old enemies, Krasavkina and Levandovsky.

Meanwhile, Kasparian herself further provoked Kostov’s wrath in 1936 by refusing his offer to become the Head of the Zhnetsy after he lost faith in Lyudmila Vishnevskaya, while his trust in Vashadze had weakened in the early 1930s when he’d tried to protect his sister-in-law, Ripsimiya Sarkisovna Nazarian, after she was implicated as a member of an opposition group. With Kostov’s approval, Aslanyan and her stepdaughter poisoned Kasparian and her husband in December 1936. Vashadze committed suicide two months later by throwing himself down a flight of stairs. Afterwards, Aslanyan ordered the arrests, executions, and deportations of Kasparian and Vashadze’s families.

Zhnetsy Chief

Aslanyan was appointed deputy head of the Zhnetsy in the fall of 1938, with the goal of finding material to discredit her nominal superior, the bloodthirsty, but not particularly bright, Valery Vsevolodovich Medvednikov. She found that most of his former inner circle were agree to betray him and easily deposed of him, with the help of a cadre of Zhnetsy she’d imported from the Caucasus. 

From 1941, most of Aslanyan’s attention was focused on suppressing the followers of Grindelwald and those who were suspected of possibly supporting him due to the dislike of the Soviet Commissariats. Aslanyan at this point became infamous throughout Europe for her brutality and ruthlessness in a way that few Zhnetsy heads had before. After the defeat of Grindelwald in 1945, the Zhnetsy and Aurors worked in tandem to ruthlessly sort out Grindelwald’s followers. Unlike in other places, the Soviet Zhnetsy and Aurors wasted no time in attempting to arrest them and instead simply executed them, sometimes in great numbers.

After the end of the Global Wizarding War, however, Aslanyan and Kostov had come to greatly dislike each other, while previously she had been a favourite of his and she’d admired and respected him. In an attempt to weaken her influence, he had a new favourite, Svarog Borisovich Myasnikov, appointed as her deputy and acting head of the Zhnetsy, which accidentally had the effect of the Zhnetsy into an inefficient hotbed of intrigue. In the fall of 1948, Kostov had Aslanyan’s second son, Isaak Romanovich Vyalitsyn, and his family exiled to Tashkent on the grounds that his third wife, Vlada Mrazović, was a Yugoslavian spy. (The unfortunate Mrazović was kept in prison until 1955). Like Zabel Lvovna Sargsyan, Aslanyan chose to say nothing about this, fearing that doing so would only make things worse.

Meanwhile, things went even further after the rails in 1949, after Kostov became convinced of a plot by non-humans and halfbreeds to destroy the wizarding Soviet Union. By 1952, Aslanyan, Dmitriy Alekseyevich Knorozov and Bereginia Forkiyevna Rechenko had entered into a conspiracy to get rid of their increasingly demented and dangerous master, with the connivance of the Czech-born Zhnets alchemist, Libuse Mstislavna Slavikova. Though they agreed to share power, their alliance rapidly fell apart after Kostov’s death.

Downfall

Aslanyan was arrested on 22 December 1953 after Rechenko and Knorozov managed to convince a group of Aurors and two dissatisfied Zhnetsy, Avdotya Feodosiyevna Pastukhova and Artyom Akteonovich Lovtsevich, to join their conspiracy.

After her arrest, she was most interested in trying to protect her remaining children, being aware that her guilt was already decided. She was convicted of treason, espionage, murdering two of her husbands, covering up the criminal behavior of her sons, intriguing with her uncle’s relations in France and daughter-in-law’s Yugoslavian relatives, and framing innocent people, some of which was true and some of which wasn’t. She was executed on 25 March 1954.

Dark Reputation

Aslanyan married five times in her life and outlived all of her husbands. Her husbands’ high mortality rate was noted from early on, but those who asked too many questions about this fact tended to end up dead themselves.

After being arrested in 1953, she confessed to having killed her third and fourth husbands, Roman Nikitich Vyalitsyn and Amiran Tevdoreyevich Arveladze, but claimed that her second, Arshavir Varuzhanovich Khachaturian, had been murdered by Vyalitsyn at her request and that her first, Thoros Lvovich Sargsyan, had simply died of an illness. (The fifth, Pytor Pavlovich Zakharchenko, was murdered by followers of Grindelwald during the Global Wizarding War and she was never suspected of involvement in that.) She did not give any motive for her murder of Arveladze, but claimed that she’d killed Vyalitsyn because he’d repeatedly threatened to kill their children in front of her while forcing her to watch.

Aslanyan gave birth to seven sons by three of her husbands, with four of them being the product of her twelve year marriage to Vyalitsyn. Her youngest son by Vyalitsyn, Aleksey, drowned in 1927, but the three surviving sons, Andronik, Isaak, and Mikhail, developed a reputation of sadistic sexual predators, a reputation they shared with their half-brother, Anatoly (the result of Vyalitsyn’s first marriage to an Abkhaz woman). Supposedly, Aslanyan not only covered up her sons’ and stepson’s crimes, but also supplied with them victims, mostly of zemlyanin girls that she would often murder afterwards to keep them quiet. Even after her arrest, Aslanyan attempted to cover for her three sons, but did not succeed. Anatoly had had the good fortune to die in the Global Wizarding War, but Andronik, Isaak, and Mikhail were also arrested not long after their mother and tried in February 1956. Andronik and Mikhail were both executed shortly afterwards, but Isaak was kept in prison. He died in 1967, probably executed on the orders of the then-head of the Zhnetsy, Snezhana Stanislavovna Barsova.

However, this dark reputation did not extend to Aslanyan’s three other sons, Sarkis Arshavirovich Khachaturian and Kviria and Kopala Amiranovich Arveladze. Sarkis was consistently described as a kind and gentle soul and his death in the Global Wizarding War was regretted by many. Kviria and Kopala, though spoiled as children by their mother, were not implicated in their half-brothers’ crimes and were all freed from prison in 1954, and exiled to Siberia with their stepsister, Valentina Romanovna Vyalitsyna. Nevertheless, Kviria came to believe that he and the rest of the family deserved to suffer because of his mother’s crimes and became an alcoholic, eventually drinking himself to death in 1963. Kopala became a librarian, married a zemylanin named Anya Feodorovna Ivanova, and had four children, but refused to speak of his mother or her family.

As for Valentina Vyalitsyna, she attempted suicide after their deportation to Siberia, but survived and later defected to China in 1964. After her death in 1977, she posthumously published a sleazy tell-all that was dedicated to airing the dirty laundry of the SK and claimed (with some justification) that they all had as much blood on their hands as her stepmother.