also set up an extermination camp at Kholmogory, near Arkhangelsk, for the mass executions of former White officers and others suspected of opposing the Bolshevik revolution. He was reportedly extremely cruel, even by the standards of the Red Terror. Donald Rayfield wrote that Kedrov "slaughter[ed] schoolchildren and Army officers in northern Russia with such ruthlessness that he had to be taken into psychiatric care." Kedrov reportedly executed captured White Russian officers by loading them onto barges and sinking them. He was ultimately relieved of his post after preparing to massacre the population of Vologda. On 5 April 1921, the chairman of the Arkhangelsk regional Cheka, Zinovi Katsnelson, reported to his superiors that: The number put to death during the reprisals overseen by Kedrov is estimated at many thousands. Later career Kedrov's career as a leading Chekist ended suddenly in 1921, when he was taken ill, and may have been temporarily confined to a psychiatric institution. After his discharge, he was posted to the Caspian Sea, where, along with running the local branch of Cheka, he was given charge of the fishing industry. From 1924, he held relatively minor economic posts, except in 1927-31, when he ran Red Sport International. In 1934, he was appointed director of the military sanitary institute. Family Kedrov's wife, Olga Didrikil, was one of three sisters, all with links to the Bolsheviks. Nina Didrikil married Nikolai Podvoisky, who played a pivotal role in the October Revolution. Olga's other sister, Augusta, was the mother of the chekist, Artur Artuzov. The Kedrovs had three sons. One, Bonifaty, achieved distinction as an academic. Another, Yury, took his own life when a teenager. The third son, Igor, was a Chekist, who was "one of the most vicious of the interrogators" who prepared the great Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, by forcing confessions out of old Bolsheviks such as Grigori Zinoviev and Karl Radek. In a tribute to father and son, published in Pravda, Igor was described as a handsome, intelligent youth who loved music, but Elizabeth Poretsky, widow of a murdered agent Ignace Reiss remembered him as a "pimpled youth with a stupid expression", and a fellow NKVD officer, Alexander Orlov believed that he and his father were both mentally ill. He later remarried. His second wife, Rebekka Plastinina, assisted him in conducting the mass executions in 1920 in the northern region, where she was known as the