He Compiled School Performance Reports “as an Act of Sabotage”

The J-Doc digital archive contains the investigation file of Mark Moiseevich Soliterman (1885–1948), an educator from Vinnytsia who was persecuted during the Great Terror. His story shows how a man who had entered politics through the Jewish socialist movement found himself accused, two decades later, of belonging to a “counter-revolutionary organisation.”

In 1917, Mark Soliterman joined the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (OESRP). After the party ceased to exist, he remained in the Soviet Union and continued working in public education. He eventually became head of the teaching methods office at the Vinnytsia Oblast Department of Public Education. You can read more about the OESRP in the “Jewish Parties and Organisations” section of the J-Doc project.

On 12 August 1937, Soliterman was arrested on charges of belonging to an alleged “Trotskyist organisation” operating within the Vinnytsia Oblast Department of Public Education. Among other things, he was accused of “concealing poor academic performance in schools” and failing to provide teachers with adequate guidance on teaching methods.

Witnesses and others implicated in the case testified against Soliterman. Years later, during the Khrushchev Thaw, one of them revealed that he had signed interrogation records while, in his own words, “in a state of unconsciousness,” after NKVD officers had beaten him dozens of times to obtain the testimony they wanted.

On 28 March 1938, the Special Conference of the NKVD of the USSR sentenced Mark Soliterman to five years in a corrective-labour camp. He served his sentence in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, at a camp agricultural unit known as Kochmes. After his release in 1946, Soliterman lived for only another two years.

In 1957, his widow appealed to the Prosecutor General of the USSR. Following a review of the case, Mark Soliterman was posthumously rehabilitated on the grounds that his actions did not constitute a crime.

You can explore the materials of this case, along with other case files concerning Jews who suffered persecution during the Great Terror, in the J-Doc digital archive.