The first war years turned out to be incredibly difficult for the entire Soviet Union, including for the army and the rear. It is not easy in 1941-1943. the Soviet militia also had to. Tens of thousands of police officers fought on the front lines - both in the military units of the Red Army, and in special units of the NKVD, in partisan detachments. But those who remained in the rear risked no less: the level of crime in the country has sharply increased. In addition, Hitler's saboteurs were added to the bandits - and the fight against them also fell on the shoulders of the Soviet police. However, the police began to prepare for a possible complication of the operational situation even before the start of the war. So, in 1940, in accordance with the order of the NKVD of the USSR, it was decided to reorganize the operational and service activities of the criminal investigation units of the Soviet militia on a linear basis. In particular, groups were allocated to combat specific types of criminal offenses. As part of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department (MUR), 11 departments were allocated, each of which specialized in specific types of crimes. In addition, a special operational detachment was transferred to the MUR, and a special paramilitary battalion was formed - it included three combat companies, an automobile team, a platoon of scooters and a machine-gun company.
At the end of 1939, the famous Moscow Criminal Investigation Department was headed by a legendary man - operas with twenty years of experience and a veteran of the Civil War, Konstantin Rudin. Despite the fact that he was at the head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department for only four years, it was during his leadership of the capital investigation that the most difficult years of the beginning of the war fell. In principle, given the difficult operational situation in the capital and the impending threat of war, the choice of such a responsible and fearless person as Rudin turned out to be very correct. During the leadership of Rudin MUR, the fight against crime in the Soviet capital remained at its best. What can I say - the head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, despite his status, did not hesitate to personally go to operations, to participate in the arrest of dangerous criminals. By the time he was appointed head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Major Konstantin Rudin was already 41 years old. Behind him - almost twenty years of service in the criminal investigation department - not only in Moscow, but also in a number of other cities of the Soviet Union. And before the police - the Civil War, in which Rudin took part in the Red Army and in which he lost three fingers.
Bindyuzhnik's Son - Civic Hero
In fact, the legend of the Moscow police was called Kasriel Mendelevich Rudin. He was born in 1898 in the small town of Velizh (pictured - a street in Velizh), which belonged to the Vitebsk province (currently Velizh is part of the Smolensk region and is the administrative center of the corresponding region). By 1898, when a son Kasriel was born in the family of a binder-worker Mendel and his wife, a hired cook, 12,193 inhabitants lived in Velizh. The ethnic composition of the town was "half-hearted" - 5,984 residents belonged to the Jewish community, 5,809 were Belarusians and 283 people were Russians (data from the 1897 census). Kasriel Rudin was also born into a Jewish family, as the name is quite understandable. His father Mendel had a large family living in poverty. The cabman and the cook could hardly feed the numerous children, while not caring about their own health. Subsequently, the father and sister of Kasriel Rudin died of tuberculosis. In 1905, a Jewish pogrom took place in Velizh. Fleeing from the pogrom, the Rudin family moved to the larger Vitebsk, where things were much better with the maintenance of order. In 1910, twelve-year-old Kasriel was forced to stop studying at the Vitebsk Jewish school and go to work in a ready-made dress store, which was kept by the Dudanov brothers on Vokzalnaya Street in Vitebsk.
It is likely that if the revolution had not happened in 1917, the young store clerk Kasriel Rudin would have remained in Vitebsk - an unknown modest seller. However, fate decreed otherwise. Like hundreds of thousands of his peers, Kasriel Rudin fell into the cycle of revolutionary events. And now - he is already at the front, as part of the Red Army. Kasriel Rudin had a chance to fight as part of the famous "Guy's division", which bore the name "Iron". Initially, the "Iron" division was officially called the 1st Simbirsk Infantry Division. It was formed on July 26, 1918 by order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 1st Army of the Eastern Front and included the volunteer detachments of Samara, Simbirsk and Sengilei. On November 18, 1918, the 1st Combined Simbirsk Infantry Division was renamed the 24th Simbirsk Infantry Division. Gaya Dmitrievich Gai (1887-1937) was appointed the first division commander who gave it its name. In fact, the division commander's name was Hayk Bzhishkyants. A native of the Persian Tabriz and an Armenian by nationality, he was born into the family of a teacher, and later moved to Tiflis to study at a theological seminary. Since 1904, the young Armenian took part in the activities of the Social Democratic Party. When the First World War began, Gaik volunteered for the army and, after graduating from the Tiflis school of instructors and officers, went to the front. There the officer displayed great personal courage. He commanded a company manned by Armenian volunteers who fought against the Turkish army on the Caucasian front. During the war years, Gaik was able to rise to the rank of staff captain and received three St. George's crosses. After the October Revolution, the Armenian revolutionary, for obvious reasons, found himself in the ranks of the fighting Red Army. It was with such a heroic division commander that I had a chance to serve as the hero of our article. Naturally, Kasriel Rudin himself, who served in the division as an assistant to the commander of a machine-gun company, did not lag behind the divisional commander in courage. By the way, along with Rudin, another Red Army soldier, who became much more famous, Georgy Zhukov, served in Guy's division. In the battle on the Belaya River, in which Gaya's "Iron Division" also took part, the assistant commander of the machine-gun company Kasriel Rudin was seriously wounded by shell fragments - in the head and in the arm, and lost three fingers on his right hand. The wounded Red Army soldier returned to Vitebsk, where he married Evgenia Sokolova, who became his only wife until the end of his life. For his valiant participation in the Civil War, Kasriel Rudin was awarded a cavalry saber and a personal pistol.
Twenty years in the field
After demobilization from the ranks of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army, Kasriel Rudin began serving in the militia. Then, in 1921, the Soviet militia was just taking its first steps. It was a very difficult time - the Civil War was still flaring, cities and villages of Russia were ravaged by military operations, numerous gangs were operating in them - both ordinary criminals and deserters, and politicized supporters of the old regime or anarchy. It was difficult to stop the criminal lawlessness of the recently formed Soviet militia - the lack of experience, and poor training, and useless weapons affected. In some counties, the police had practically no firearms. Yes, and served in the militia most often either very young guys, or elderly people fit for non-combatant service, or war invalids. But, despite numerous difficulties, the Soviet militia strengthened with each month of its existence, made more and more victories over crime. And the most important role in this belonged to the first generation of Soviet law enforcement officers, to which Rudin belonged. It was about them - the operas of the first post-revolutionary years - that the immortal works "The Tale of the Criminal Investigation", "Green Van", "Probationary Period" and many others were later created. The formation of the Soviet criminal investigation department began at the end of 1918. On October 5, 1918, the NKVD of the USSR approved the "Regulations on the organization of criminal investigation departments". In accordance with the Regulations, in the settlements of the RSFSR, it was ordered to create, in all provincial directorates of the Soviet workers 'and peasants' militia, in the towns of both district and townships with a population of at least 40,000 - 45 000 residents of the criminal investigation department. The created criminal investigation department was subordinate to the Central Directorate of Criminal Investigation, which was part of the Main Directorate of the Workers 'and Peasants' Militia of the NKVD of the RSFSR.
Kasriel Rudin began his service in the criminal investigation department of Vitebsk - the city where he spent his teenage years. In Vitebsk, the provincial police department was created on August 15, 1918. He was placed in the building of the former governor's palace, in which several offices were allocated to the police. As in other regions of the RSFSR, in Vitebsk, the provincial administration included railway, water and industrial militias as subdivisions. And the disclosure of crimes of a criminal nature was entrusted to the provincial criminal investigation department, which was included in the police in 1923. Of course, Vitebsk was not Odessa, Rostov or Moscow, but even here the confusion of the Civil War made itself felt. Dangerous gangs of criminals operated on the territory of the city and in its environs, creating many problems for the population of the province. The militiamen had to make a lot of efforts to put an end to the gangs of Tsvetkov, Vorobyov, Ruzhinsky, Korunny, Gromov, Agafonchik and other dangerous criminals once and for all. After serving in the Vitebsk criminal investigation department, Rudin was transferred to Simferopol. The Crimean militia also had a hard time - they had to wage an intense struggle against the criminal elements that flooded the Soviet Crimea. In addition, there was a difficult operational situation in the Crimea along the counterintelligence line - the peninsula always aroused the interest of foreign special services, since it was the base of the Soviet fleet and had a strategic location. Criminal investigation officers also had to participate in the capture of spies. During the years of work in the criminal investigation department of Vitebsk and Simferopol, Ryazan and Saratov, Kasriel Rudin, who was called Constantine for "simplicity", was encouraged sixteen times - for exemplary service. A dashing soldier of the Civil, he was the "plowman" of the criminal investigation department. Do not count the criminals caught with the direct participation of Rudin. In 1936-1939. Kasriel Rudin headed the Saratov criminal investigation department. These were the most intense years for the Soviet police.
Although, in general, the crime situation in the late 1930s. normalized and it could not even be compared with the situation at the beginning of the 1920s, the life of Soviet militiamen was overshadowed by not always justified political repressions and persecutions. Many senior and middle managers of the NKVD of the USSR, among whom were excellent operatives, disappeared without a trace in the second half of the 1930s. Some of them, of course, by excesses and mistakes themselves brought reprisals to themselves, but many were convicted and shot groundlessly. So, in 1938, Leonid Davidovich Vul (1899-1938) was shot by the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, in 1933-1937. Head of the Office of Workers 'and Peasants' Militia for the city ofMoscow. Shortly before his arrest, Vul was transferred to Saratov - to the position of head of the Workers 'and Peasants' Militia Directorate and assistant to the head of the Saratov Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR. It was in his subordination that the hero of our article, Rudin, was. And - for little, he did not share the fate of the chief. Moreover, some persons in the political department "sharpened their teeth" on the opera, who did not approve of the organization of the fight against hooliganism, the state of party education, and so on. In December 1938, Albert Robertovich Stromnn (Geller, 1902-1939) was arrested, who served as head of the NKVD in the Saratov region. Stromin, the son of a German Social Democrat who emigrated to Russia in 1913, was suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. And this despite the fact that Stromin, as a 17-year-old youth, participated in the Civil War, was wounded in the defense of Yekaterinoslav, and since 1920 he served in the organs of the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD. State Security Major Stromin was shot in 1939. Surprisingly, Konstantin Rudin managed to avoid arrest - perhaps the plan for repressions in the Saratov UNKVD was simply fulfilled, and perhaps the professional operative was not touched for purely utilitarian reasons - after all, he was not so much an administrative figure as a real "plowman" on whom they depended successes in the practical activities of the Saratov investigation.
At the head of the Criminal Investigation Office of the capital
From the Saratov region, Konstantin Rudin was transferred to Moscow. Here, in the capital of the Soviet Union, due to the size of the population, and the very status of the city, the operational situation was much more complicated than in Saratov. However, the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department (MUR) was famous for its professionalism throughout the country. Konstantin Rudin was to lead the most "elite" division of the Soviet criminal investigation department. The first combat successes of MUR date back to the very beginning of its existence. Then, in 1918, the detectives of the old Moscow Criminal Investigation, who recognized the Soviet power and agreed to continue to carry out their professional duties, joined the MUR almost in full force. It should be noted that no matter how sincerely the revolutionary sailors, soldiers, workers, students, who formed the backbone of the Soviet militia in the first post-revolutionary years, were sincerely disposed to fight against crime, they could not do without old specialists in operational-search activities. Despite the fact that the attitude towards the former tsarist policemen in Soviet Russia was cool, even the leaders of the Soviet NKVD from among the professional revolutionaries perfectly understood the need to involve specialists of the "old school" in the construction of new Soviet law enforcement agencies. Moreover, unlike the gendarmes, the detectives of the criminal investigation almost did not touch in their daily activities the fight against the political opponents of the tsarist regime. Accordingly, party leaders with pre-revolutionary experience practically had no resentment against them.
However, verified people were put in charge of the criminal investigation department. Such as the first head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Alexander Maksimovich Trepalov (1887-1937), a former Baltic sailor. A native of St. Petersburg, Trepalov, before being drafted into the Navy, worked as a roller operator at a shipyard, during the First World War he served as a galvaner on the armored cruiser Rurik of the Baltic Fleet. For his revolutionary activities, Trepalov was put in a floating prison on the ship "Grozny" in Revel, and then written off ashore. On land, Alexander Maksimovich fought on the Western and Austrian fronts, and in the fall of 1917, after the October Revolution, he became an employee of the St. Petersburg Cheka. In 1918, it was Alexander Trepalov who was appointed the first head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department (MUR). In this position, the former sailor showed himself to be a real master of detective work - and this despite the fact that until 1917 he had nothing to do with operational search or investigative activities, and indeed to the protection of order, but was an ordinary worker and sailor of the fleet. In 1920, for his successes in the fight against crime, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee awarded Trepalov the Order of the Red Banner - at that time the highest state award of Soviet Russia.
Konstantin Rudin became the eighth (including Trepalov) head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. Prior to him, this position was held by senior police major Viktor Petrovich Ovchinnikov (1898-1938). He served as the main Moscow opera from 1933 to 1938, having managed to solve the famous "Melekess affair".
Recall that in December 1936 in the city of Melekess of the Kuibyshev region (now the Samara region), the famous teacher Maria Vladimirovna Pronina, a delegate to the VIII Extraordinary All-Union Congress of Soviets, was also a member of its editorial committee, was brutally murdered for the purpose of robbery. To investigate the murder, a special MUR brigade headed by Viktor Petrovich Ovchinnikov was sent to Melekess. In just three days, the Murovites got on the trail of the deputy's killers - they turned out to be local criminals Rozov, Fedotov and Eshcherkin. In 1937, the entire criminal trinity, on whose hands there was blood and other victims, were sentenced to death and carried out. For solving the high-profile case, Ovchinnikov was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. But Stalin's reception in the Kremlin did not save the senior police major from reprisals - in 1938 he was arrested and shot. And in such a turbulent time, Kasriel Rudin headed the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department.
By the way, to the question of police ranks. The eye of a modern reader, who is not familiar with the history of domestic law enforcement agencies, is probably "cut off" by the title of "senior police major", which was worn by Rudin's predecessor as head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Viktor Petrovich Ovchinnikov. There is no such rank in the modern Russian police. He was not in the Russian and Soviet militia after 1943 either. The fact is that until 1943 the Soviet militia and state security agencies had their own system of special ranks, which significantly differed from the army one. By order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 157 of May 5, 1936, the following special ranks of commanding officers and enlisted personnel were introduced in the workers 'and peasants' militia: 1) policeman, 2) senior policeman, 3) detached police commander, 4) police commander, 5) police foreman, 6) militia sergeant, 7) militia junior lieutenant, 8) militia lieutenant, 9) militia senior lieutenant, 10) militia captain, 11) militia major, 12) militia senior major, 13) militia inspector, 14) militia director, 15) chief director of the police. We see that the ranks of the militia that are identical to the army ranks are actually one step higher than the army ranks. So, the rank of "senior police major" was in fact a general and corresponded to the military rank of "division commander" in the Red Army. The rank of "police major", which Kasriel Rudin was at the time of his appointment as head of the MUR, was similar to the army rank of "brigade commander". In modern Russia, brigade commanders most often carry the military rank of "colonel", but in a number of foreign countries there is the rank of "brigadier general" between colonel and major general. Here you can compare the brigade commander of the Red Army or the police major in 1936-1943. Thus, already at the end of the 1930s, the position of the head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department corresponded to the rank of general, and the degree of responsibility in this position was just as high.
Despite his high position, Kasriel Rudin personally participated in many high-profile operations of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, although he risked his own life, while he could have sent his subordinates. In particular, Rudin personally went with the operatives subordinate to him to Yaroslavl, where a dangerous criminal who had fled from Moscow was hiding. In Yaroslavl, the Murovites learned that the bandit was hiding in one of the city's hotels. Then Kasriel Rudin ordered his subordinates to block the escape routes, and he single-handedly entered the criminal's room. The latter drew his pistol and began to step back. He shot at the approaching Rudin, but did not hit. The head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department managed to convince the criminal to drop his weapon and detained him. There were a lot of such episodes in the life of Kasriel Rudin.
Investigation during the war
On June 22, 1941, after the treacherous attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War began. For several months, Hitler's troops managed to significantly advance deep into Soviet territory. The battles were fought in the suburbs, there was a very significant risk that the enemies would break into Moscow. In this difficult situation, I had to be doubly vigilant. A significant part of the responsibility for catching spies, enemy saboteurs, traitors from among the local population was assigned to the employees of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. Also, police officers, criminal investigation officers, together with workers of the printing house "Red Proletarian", a watch factory, employees of the radio committee, students of the Institute of Physical Education, students of the Industrial Academy, high school students, workers of a number of People's Commissariats, became part of the fighter motorized rifle regiment, formed in October 1941 and who fought heroically on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War in 1941-1945. The fighter regiment was tasked with operating in the immediate rear of the Nazis, exterminating the enemy's manpower and military equipment, destroying its infrastructure and rear services, destroying transport communications and communication lines, and carrying out reconnaissance functions. Only from November 13, 1941 to January 31, 1942, the regiment sent 104 battle groups to the rear of the enemy. The regiment's soldiers destroyed in two months 1,016 Nazi soldiers and officers, 6 tanks and 46 enemy vehicles, 1 artillery gun, mined 8 highways, blew up three warehouses and a car repair base, destroyed two bridges, and cut off enemy communication lines in 440 places.
The leadership of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department was instructed from the most active and trained operational officers to form special groups for delivery to the front - as reconnaissance and sabotage units. The head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Police Major Rudin, summoned his subordinates. It was necessary to create a partisan group for operations behind enemy lines on the territory of the Ruzsky and Novo-Petrovsky districts. Having examined the employees, the veteran of the Civil War, Rudin, selected the most trained. He appointed senior operative Viktor Kolesov as commander of the detachment, and operative Mikhail Nemtsov as commissar of the detachment. The detachment consisted of about thirty people and made raids into the location of enemy bases. During one of these raids, the commander of the detachment, police sergeant Kolesov, was killed - he fell in battle with the Nazis on November 16, 1941, covering the withdrawal of his colleagues. In Moscow itself, completely non-core tasks lay down on the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department - for example, extinguishing fires that began after the bombing of Hitler's aircraft. In addition, the Murovites regularly identified and detained deserters, Nazi signalmen and spies, paratroopers and saboteurs. The head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Police Major Rudin, personally took part in the deployment of reconnaissance and sabotage groups to the rear of the Nazi troops. During one of these operations, he was nearly shot by a German sniper - Rudin was saved by the dedication of his subordinate.
What tasks Moscow operatives had to solve at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War is evidenced by this case. At the Kazansky railway station, a group of police officers were patrolling and checking documents. The senior operative of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Weiner, approached a man in the uniform of a captain of the Red Army for the purpose of checking documents. The officer turned out to be all right with the documents, but there was no symbol on the travel certificate. The operatives suspected something was wrong and invited the captain to proceed to the duty military commandant of the station. The captain was asked to show his personal weapons and documents. The officer calmly laid the revolver and identification card on the table. However, at that moment he tried to swallow some piece of paper. Operatives snatched it out of the hands of a serviceman - it turned out that it was a receipt from the station's storage room. Naturally, after that it became clear to the Murovites that the officer was not who he claimed to be. They searched the captain and found a Walther pistol in his boots, hidden documents with seals of various military units in his boots. The suitcase, which the operatives took from the locker room, contained three million rubles and a bundle of documents. Everything became clear - a resident of German intelligence was standing in front of the Murovites, who was tasked with establishing contact with the scouts operating on the Moscow railway. The spy was handed over to counterintelligence. And this is far from the only such case in the activities of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department during the Great Patriotic War. In addition to searching for spies, the Murovites were also assigned the task of identifying and arresting deserters and persons evading mobilization. There were quite a few of them in Moscow of many millions, especially since people from other cities also flocked here. To identify such elements, a special unit was created in the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, which was in close contact with the transport police, district commissioners, military commandant's offices, house administrations, Komsomol and party organizations. The Murovites also contributed to ensuring compliance with the passport regime in Moscow, which was also of great importance during the difficult war years.
Since the number of the operational staff of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, due to the dispatch of many of the best employees to the front, has significantly decreased, the remaining ones have doubled the workload. Moreover, in the hungry war years, the crime situation in the city worsened. So, in Moscow, criminal gangs appeared, trading in armed attacks on grocery stores and warehouses, bases. When Hitler's troops approached Moscow, speculators and criminals became more active on the streets of the city, and acts of looting began. The police received additional wartime rights, in particular - the right to shoot looters at the crime scene, without trial or investigation. On Vosstaniya Square, a group of criminals seized cars with equipment from factories that were going to be evacuated to the east of the country, and were going to leave Moscow in these cars. A detachment of employees of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department urgently moved to the scene. Murovtsa shot the criminals with machine guns, the attempt to steal cars with valuable equipment was prevented.
In addition to robberies and robberies, cases of fraud and counterfeiting of food ration cards have become more frequent. The theft of food ration cards has become a very common crime. Thieves, thereby, doomed their victims to hunger, since it was almost impossible to get food without cards. In this situation, the Murovites always rushed to help the Muscovites. In particular, they managed to catch a certain citizen Ovchinnikova, who stole more than 60 ration cards. Despite the difficult situation, the employees of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department brilliantly coped with their service. So, only in the second half of 1941 in Moscow 90% of the murders and 83% of burglaries were solved. Order in the city was established by tough but fair methods.
The return of the German encryption apparatus was a well-known operation of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. The trophy device disappeared during transportation in a military truck in the fall of 1941. Counterintelligence officers, for whom the device was of great interest, turned to the officers of the criminal investigation department for help. The operation to find the missing encryption apparatus was led by the deputy head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, Georgy (Grigory) Tylner, a man no less legendary than his chief Rudin. The same age as the twentieth century, Tylner began serving in the Moscow police in 1917. A young high school student came to the criminal investigation unit of the 2nd Tver police commissariat to get a job. Soon, despite his young age, yesterday's high school student became the deputy head of the police commissariat for the criminal investigation department, and in 1919 he was invited to work in the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. For more than twenty years of service, he went from a criminal investigation agent to the deputy head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. Tylner took part in the capture of the famous Koshelkov gang, which organized the attack and robbery of the car of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Tylner and his subordinates began to work out versions of the disappearance of the encryption machine. They interviewed the officers accompanying the apparatus and set off on the route followed by the car. During the trip, the investigators noticed how the boys on skates, equipped with special wire hooks, pulled the knots out of a car passing along the street. Soon the teenagers were detained, the identity of the boy who stole the encryption machine was established. The MUR officers moved to the place indicated to them - the basement of the grocery store, where the boy threw out the car as unnecessary, and took out the device. After Tylner managed to track down the stolen cipher machine, the escorting convoy escaped a 100% tribunal.
In October 1941, Rudin and Tylner directed the liquidation of a dangerous gang of the Shablov brothers. The gang consisted of fifteen people who were engaged in armed attacks on food warehouses in Moscow. In 1942, Moscow detectives neutralized another gang - a certain Gypsy, under whose leadership ten criminals had gathered. "Gypsies" specialized in burglary, cleaning the apartments of the residents of the Soviet capital evacuated or leaving for the front. Of course, there were many such criminal groups in military Moscow. Only in 1942-1943. Murovtsy managed to detain ten gangs specializing in burglary.
last years of life
However, despite the difficult operational situation in Moscow and the ongoing hostilities, the internal struggle did not stop in the law enforcement agencies of the USSR and the state security agencies. Someone did not like Rudin's activities as head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. At the same time, the authorities had no complaints against Kasriel Mendelevich. He was awarded the Orders of Lenin, the Red Star, the Red Banner, the Badge of Honor, and the medal For the Defense of Moscow. In March 1943, Kasriel Mendelevich Rudin was awarded the special title of "police commissar of the third rank." Note that in February 1943, in accordance with the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "On the ranks of the commanding staff of the NKVD and the police" dated 1943-09-02, ranks identical to ranks in the Red Army were established in the Soviet militia. Only the ranks of the highest commanding staff of the militia differed from the army ones - the ranks of militia commissars of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd ranks were introduced, corresponding to the ranks of colonel general, lieutenant general and major general. Thus, Kasriel Rudin in 1943 became, if we draw analogies with the modern hierarchy of ranks, a major general of the militia.
However, despite his high rank, Kasriel Rudin did not succeed in retaining a leading position in the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. At the end of 1943, he was criticized by the higher leadership - allegedly for the deterioration of the operational situation in Moscow. In fact, given the war years, the crime situation remained tense in all cities and towns of the Soviet Union, and not only in Moscow. But this was not taken into account by those who wanted to remove Rudin from the post of head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. In April 1943, Rudin was relieved of his post as head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. The new head of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Soviet capital was Militia Colonel Leonid Pavlovich Rasskazov, also a veteran of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, who joined the criminal investigation department at the very beginning of its existence, as a student at the Institute of Railway Engineers. However, Rasskazov was in the position of the head of the MUR for only a few months - until December 1943. In 1944, the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department was headed by the third rank militia commissar Alexander Mikhailovich Urusov, who previously headed the Workers 'and Peasants' Militia Directorate in the Sverdlovsk Region. Alexander Mikhailovich Urusov remained at the post of head of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department for six years - until 1950.
Police commissar of the third rank Rudin was transferred to the post of head of the Astrakhan police department. It is clear that this position was an "honorable exile" - on the one hand, Rudin, given his great services, did not want to offend and therefore was appointed to a high leadership position - not even the head of the criminal investigation department, but the head of the police department, but on the other hand, between service in Moscow and service in provincial Astrakhan still lay an abyss. Moreover, the rank in which Rudin was located did not in any way correspond to his new position. Indeed, in Astrakhan, the police were much less numerous than in Moscow. Naturally, the transfer to the provinces affected the health of Kasriel Mendelevich. Soon, due to deteriorating health, the third-rank militia commissar Rudin was recalled from Astrakhan and appointed head of the department for special assignments at the Main Directorate of the USSR Militia. It is clear that this appointment was also a kind of "honorable" - they did not want to get rid of a highly professional and honored policeman, moreover still young, but they took into account his state of health and did not want to put him in a laborious and responsible position.
In the spring of 1945, Kasriel Rudin returned from a business trip to the Baltic States in a painful condition. He felt very bad, with a high fever, and was hospitalized right off the train. On April 8, 1945, Kasriel Mendelevich Rudin died at the age of 48. The cause of death of the police commissar was cirrhosis of the liver. The legendary Murovite was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. Kasriel Rudin never managed to see the post-war Soviet Union, to meet and celebrate the Great Victory, to the approach of which he undoubtedly made a great contribution, although he did not personally participate in hostilities. By the way, Kasriel Rudin's brother, Yakov Rudin, also worked in the police - he headed the passport office in the Kerch police department and died during the war, defending Kerch with arms from Nazi invaders. Kasriel Rudin's son Boris Kasrielevich Rudin also took part in the Great Patriotic War.
