Tagantsev conspiracy

The Tagantsev conspiracy (or the case of the Petrograd Military Organization) was a non-existent monarchist conspiracy fabricated by the Soviet secret police in 1921 to terrorize intellectuals who might be in a potential opposition to the ruling Bolshevik regime. As its result, more than 800 people, mostly from scientific and artistic communities in Petrograd (modern-day Saint Petersburg), were arrested on false terrorism charges, out of which 98 were executed and many were sent to concentration camps. Among the executed was the poet Nikolay Gumilev, the co-founder of the influential Acmeist movement.

The affair was named after Vladimir Nikolaevich Tagantsev, a geographer and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who was arrested, tortured, and tricked into disclosing hundreds of names of people who were critical the Bolshevik regime. The case was manufactured by Yakov Agranov, who later became one of the chief organizers of Stalinist show trials and the Great Purge in the 1930s. The case was officially declared "fabricated" and its victims rehabilitated by Russian authorities in 1992.

On December 5, 1920, all departments of the Soviet secret police Cheka received a top secret order from Feliks Dzerzhinsky to start creating false flag White Army organizations, "underground and terrorist groups" to facilitate finding "foreign agents on our territory". This was planned partially as a provocation, in order to identify potentially disloyal citizens who might wish to join the Bolsheviks' enemies.

A few months later, in February 1921, the Kronstadt rebellion began. This was a left-wing uprising against the Bolshevik regime by soldiers and sailors. Additionally, the Bolsheviks understood that the majority of intelligentsia did not support them. On March 8, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) send a letter to People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) asking to identify a group of unreliable intellectuals who could be a target of future repressions.

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