'female executioner'. Arrest and Execution In February or March, Mikhail and Igor Kedrov jointly signed a letter to Stalin, denouncing Lavrentiy Beria, the recently appointed head of the NKVD. The older Kedrov had reputedly conducted an investigation in the Azerbaijan branch of Cheka in 1921, and had concluded that Beria was a British agent – a charge that was revived after Beria's arrest, years later. Igor Kedrov was arrested, and shot in January 1940. Mikhail Kedrov was arrested in April 1939. From prison, he wrote a letter to the Politburo member, Andrei Andreyev: Brought in front of a Military Collegium he was – very unusually – acquitted, but was still in custody after the German invasion of the USSR. He was evacuated from Moscow on Beria's instructions, and taken with other prisoners to a village in Kuibyshev (Samara), and shot on 28 October 1941. Posthumous reputation Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had decided to denounce crimes committed by the secret police during Stalin's time, but needed to retain the support of Cheka's successor organisation, the KGB. Khrushchev had ordered the execution of Beria, and therefore had a motive for stressing Beria's role in the repression. Kedrov consequently suited his purpose, as a former Chekist who was not implicated in the purges of the 1930s and whose murder could be attributed to Beria personally. The extract from Kedrov's letter to Andreyev, quoted above, was read out by Khrushchev during his famous Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet communist party in 1956. Khrushchev's renewed campaign against the neo-Stalinists was accompanied by a detailed account of Kedrov's and Beria's mutual enmity, in Leningradskaya Pravda, 25 February 1964. He was profiled again in Izvestya, 7 November 1970, and there was a 90th birthday tribute in Pravda 24 February 1978, when postage stamps were issued in his honour. Streets were named after him in Arkhangelsk, Moscow and Kotlas. A whole page of Pravda was devoted to Mikhail and Igor Kedrov, 17 February 1989. A petition calling for Kedrov Street in Arkhangelsk to be renamed was blocked by the authorities in 2016.) Honours and awards References 1878 births 1941 deaths Cheka officers Cheka Old Bolsheviks Russian executioners Russian revolutionaries People of the Russian Civil War Recipients of the Order of the Red Banner Russian Social Democratic Labour Party members Communist Party of the Soviet Union members Politicians from Moscow Great Purge victims from