Moisei Itkin
1899 – 1938
Director, Agro-Joint, Dnepropetrovsk
Moisei Itkin was the Acting Director of the Agro-Joint office in Dnepropetrovsk. He was arrested by the NKVD in 1938 and charged with “Zionist propaganda and espionage activities and the training of specialists for Palestine.” Itkin was sentenced to death and executed in 1938. He was “rehabilitated” (his name was officially cleared) in 1958.
Extended Profile
Moisei Grigorievich Itkin, born in Israilevka, Kherson gubernia (today Ukraine) and a resident of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, spent a year studying at a university in the United States. Itkin served as an Agronomist in the Dnepropetrovsk Department of Agro-Joint and as Acting Director of the Agro-Joint office in that city. He was one of the Agro-Joint staff members who helped Avram Fridberg secure a part-time position with Agro-Joint [see entry on Avram Fridberg].
Itkin was arrested on January 9, 1938, and charged with “Zionist propaganda and espionage activities and the training of specialists for Palestine.” On April 11, 1938, he was sentenced to be shot, with all of his personal property to be confiscated, by the NKVD Troika of the Dnepropetrovsk oblast. He was executed on May 5, 1938. Itkin was “rehabilitated” (his name was officially cleared) on August 15, 1958, by the Military Tribunal of the Kiev Military District.
Moisei Itkin appears in the group photograph, Agro-Joint Staff Moscow 1927 in second row, sixth from left.
Sources
GADO (State Archives of the Dnepropetrovsk Oblast).
Mitsel, Mikhail. “The Final Chapter: Agro-Joint Workers – Victims of the Great Terror in the USSR, 1937-1940.” Eastern European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 1, April 2009.
Morrissey, Evelyn. Workers and Farmers in the Crimea and Ukraine. New York: privately printed, 1937.