# Olga Shatunovskaya

Olga Grigoryevna Shatunovskaya (Russian: Ольга Григорьевна Шатуновская; 1 March 1901, Baku – 23 November 1990, Moscow) was a prominent Old Bolshevik. In 1918, she was the secretary of the head of the Baku Council of People's Commissars. She served an 8-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag. Shatunovskaya played an important role in the implementation of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. A survivor of the Gulag, she was a member of Shvernik Commission created by Nikita Khrushchev to investigate the crimes of Joseph Stalin.

## Early life

Shatunovskaya was born in Baku in a Jewish family. Her father, Grigory Shatunovsky (1871–1922), was a lawyer and studied at St. Petersburg University. Her mother, Victoria Borisovna Shatunovskaya (1876–1957), was a housewife.
In 1913, Shatunovskaya entered the Mariinsky Girls' Gymnasium in Baku. In 1915 she began attending Marxist circles. In January 1916 Shatunovskaya joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1917 she graduated Mariinsky Gymnasium with honors and a gold medal.

## Baku Commune

On March 30, 1918, Shatunovskaya left her parents’ house and joined the Bolshevik fighting squad. After the February Revolution, she worked in the editorial office of the newspaper Bakinskii Rabochii. During this period, she made a trip to the front line of the Turkish front in Bilajary.
A close associate of Anastas Mikoyan, she headed the press office of the Baku Council of People's Commissars during the Baku Commune period, and was the secretary of the Chairman of the Baku Council of People's Commissars Stepan Shaumian.
After the fall of Soviet power in Baku, she was left in the city to carry out underground work. In September 1918, after the entry of Turkish troops into Baku and the execution of 26 Baku commissars, Shatunovskaya was arrested and sentenced by the Turkish command to death by hanging, but was pardoned and released.
In December 1918, Shatunovskaya took part in the Transcaucasian underground conference of the Bolsheviks near Tiflis. In April 1919, she returned from Tiflis to Baku, where from July to November 1919 she was the editor of newspapers published in the Baku underground.

## Early career and arrest

Since 1920, she was the secretary of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, the secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, and then worked in party work in Bryansk province. From 1925, she worked again in Azerbaijan as the secretary of the district committee and was a member of the Baku party committee.
She was arrested in November 1937, and in May 1938 he was sent to a Gulag labor camps for 8 years on charges of being a "counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization" by the NKVD. From the Old Bolshevik she became a political prisoner of the Stalinist regime.

## Rehabilitation and de-Stalinization

After Stalin's death in 1953, she was rehabilitated in the Soviet Union on May 24, 1954 by the Commission for the Review of Cases of Convicts and Exiles. In 1956–1962, she was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in 1960 she dealt with issues related to the rehabilitation of those who were repressed, and was a member of the Shvernik Commission established by the Presidium of the Soviet Union.
Shatunovskaya became a member of the Soviet Party Control Committee, and head of a special commission on rehabilitations during the Khrushchev Thaw. She was the chief-investigator of the Kirov murder. She retired in 1962.
Shatunovskaya was honored with the highest Soviet medals. Her memoirs, recorded by her children and grandchildren, were turned into a book by philosopher and essayist Grigory Pomerants under the title Sledstvie vedet katorzhanka [Investigation led by convict], published in 2004.